Who Is Andrea Stella? – McLaren Places Their Bet in the Team Principals Roulette of F1

McLaren has to deal with a major change in its structure as team principal Andreas Seidl has left the team. The Woking outfit has promoted Andrea Stella to replace the outgoing German. Andrea Stella has been with the team since 2015 and is their current Racing Director.

Andrea Stella has been in F1 for more than two decades. He completed his graduation in Aerospace Engineering. In the year 2000, he also completed his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering. The Italian joined Ferrari the same year as a Performance engineer.

In his initial 2 years, he was with the test team at Maranello. Post that from 2002 to 2006, Stella was the Performance engineer for Michael Schumacher. He further continued in the same role for 2 more years with Kimi Raikkonen. In 2009, he became a race engineer for the Scuderia.

Stella served as the Race engineer for Raikkonen in 2009 and then for Fernando Alonso from 2010 to 2014. After that, he joined McLaren in 2015 as the Head of Race Operations. His next major role change was in 2018 as a Performance Director for the Woking team.

In December 2019, he got promoted as the Executive Director of Racing for McLaren. Based on his substantial experience, McLaren CEO Zak Brown has further promoted the 51-year-old to Team Principal.

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As per Formula 1 correspondent Lawrence Barretto, Andreas Seidl already had plans to move to the Sauber-Audi project in 2026. While he was transparent with Zak Brown about the same, the Sauber group had to move up Seidl’s appointment.

McLaren enters the 2022-23 Exodus of F1 Team Principals

After the transparent departure of current team boss Andreas Seidl, McLaren announced Andrea Stella’s appointment on a day when there has been a frenzy of news at various teams. The entire exodus of team bosses and CEOs of teams started with Williams‘ Jost Capito.

Capito announced on December 12 that he shall be leaving Williams along with their technical director FX Demaison. Following that Alfa Romeo (the Sauber Group) announced their team principal Frederic Vasseur will also leave the team for next season.

Ferrari announced Vasseur to replace outgoing Mattia Binotto for the 2023 season, within minutes of Alfa Romeo’s announcement. Besides the Vasseur news, Sauber also announced that Andreas Seidl will join the Sauber team as CEO, leaving McLaren in 2023. As per Barretto, due to Vasseur exiting earlier than expected, Sauber had to bring up Seidl on board quickly.

While Zak Brown had planned Seidl’s replacement, McLaren put out their announcement of Andrea Stella as team principal for the next season. Brown said about Stella’s promotion, “I’m delighted that Andrea Stella will step into the Team Principal role and lead our F1 technical and operational program.”

“Andrea is a highly talented, experienced, and respected member of our team with a strong track record of leadership and success in Formula 1.”

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With a rich experience with former world champions and leading race operations, Stella will be key to McLaren’s future ambitions, as they look forward to moving up the grid with a dynamic lineup of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri from 2023 onwards.