Andrea Stella is an Italian engineer and the Team Principal of the McLaren Formula 1 team, a role he has held since the start of the 2023 season. Under his leadership McLaren won back-to-back Constructors' Championships in 2024 and 2025 and Lando Norris took the 2025 Drivers' title. ¹

He was born on 22 February 1971 in Orvieto, Umbria, Italy. He studied at Sapienza University of Rome, earning a degree in aerospace engineering in 1997 and completing a doctorate in mechanical engineering in 2000, with research on the fluid dynamics of flames. ¹

“Stella joined McLaren in 2015 as Head of Race Operations, around the time of Alonso's own move to the team.”

Ferrari years

Stella joined Ferrari in 2000 as a performance engineer on the test team. He worked as a performance engineer alongside Michael Schumacher during Ferrari's dominant era, and was a track engineer for Valentino Rossi during the MotoGP star's Ferrari F1 tests. He then became performance engineer for Kimi Raikkonen, including the Finn's 2007 championship-winning campaign, and stepped up to be Raikkonen's race engineer in 2009. ¹

Engineering Fernando Alonso

From 2010 to 2014 Stella was Fernando Alonso's race engineer, on the wall for three championship runner-up campaigns against Sebastian Vettel in 2010, 2012 and 2013. He has called the 2010 Abu Dhabi finale, where Alonso went into the race leading the standings but a botched early pit stop dropped him behind Vitaly Petrov and out of the title fight, one of the most painful days of his F1 career. The relationship proved formative: Alonso has said he "in a way" brought Stella to McLaren, and when McLaren clinched the 2024 Constructors' title at the same Abu Dhabi circuit, Alonso told him it was a measure of payback for 2010. ²

Move to McLaren

Stella joined McLaren in 2015 as Head of Race Operations, around the time of Alonso's own move to the team. He rose to Performance Director in 2018 and then Racing Director in 2019, forming part of the senior leadership group during McLaren's rebuilding years under team principal Andreas Seidl. ¹

Team Principal

McLaren announced in December 2022 that Stella would succeed Seidl as Team Principal for 2023; his title is Team Principal and Chief Racing Officer. ³ One of his defining moves was replacing a single all-powerful technical-director hierarchy with a multi-director model, each owning a performance pillar: he hired Rob Marshall from Red Bull as chief designer, empowered Peter Prodromou over aerodynamics, named Neil Houldey over engineering and Mark Temple over performance. ⁴

Titles

In 2024 McLaren won the World Constructors' Championship for the first time in 26 years, their first since 1998, with a car that scored points at every round. In 2025 the team successfully defended the title while Norris won the Drivers' Championship, sealing McLaren's first drivers-and-constructors double since 1998. ⁵⁶

Management style

Stella is widely regarded as a calm, engineering-led and people-focused manager who favours a collaborative leadership structure over a single-figurehead model, hiring leaders who embrace collective problem-solving. ⁴ That approach was tested in 2025 by an intense intra-team title fight between Norris and Piastri, governed by McLaren's "papaya rules." After a slow Norris pit stop at the Italian Grand Prix, Stella ordered Piastri to hand the place back, framing it as "the fair thing to do" and consistent with McLaren's principles even as Piastri publicly questioned the call. ⁷

2026 and beyond

Stella has signed a multi-year extension committing him beyond Formula 1's 2026 regulation reset. ⁸ He has been a prominent voice on the new rules, naming qualifying as a "priority number one" concern under the energy-deployment regime and confirming McLaren worked closely with its Mercedes power-unit partner to prepare. ⁹ Looking ahead, McLaren has confirmed that Gianpiero Lambiase, Max Verstappen's long-time Red Bull race engineer, will join to take on race-leadership duties. ³

Why he matters

Stella took a McLaren he himself frames as a 2015 backmarker and, through cultural change and targeted technical hires, rebuilt it into Formula 1's benchmark team. He describes his philosophy as identifying and recruiting external difference-makers, such as Marshall, while empowering existing McLaren engineers who had been underused under previous vertical structures, and he insists on a flat, consensus-driven leadership in which anyone who cannot embrace collective problem-solving is "just not at the table." His distinctive value therefore lies as much in leadership and culture as in engineering, and his stature has fuelled persistent speculation linking him to rival teams. ⁴

Bottom line

Stella is an engineer's team principal whose career runs from race-engineering world champions at Ferrari to leading McLaren back to the front. Having delivered consecutive Constructors' crowns and a drivers' title, he is among the most respected leaders on the grid heading into F1's new regulatory era. ¹⁵