F1 News: McLaren's 'Papaya Red Bull' will dominate rest of 2024

Since becoming team principal at McLaren, Andrea Stella has overseen tremendous progress at the team, but it’s likely that ex-Red Bull Engineer Rob Marshall, who worked alongside Adrian Newey, that has made the real difference – stealing all of Red Bull’s secrets.

–by Mark Cipolloni–

In the space of less than eighteen months, McLaren have catapulted themselves from the midfield to the very front using many of Red Bull’s design secrets.

Rob Marshall is now with McLaren and has all of Red Bull’s design secrets implemented on their car

However, with Adrian Newey leaving Red Bull, the team has gone backwards, but McLaren has made progress and gone forward. The loss of Rob Marshall to McLaren and the loss of Newey has decimated the Red Bull design brain power.

However, Stella is not satisfied with occasional victories – he wants his team to dominate what remains of this season.

“In the drivers’ championship, we definitely wanted to focus on the fact that it is possible,” he said after the Dutch GP.

“We even talked about it and looked at what Vettel did in 2013, and we said – ‘We could do the same thing. Why not?’

“We have to keep the focus; we have to believe that it is possible.”

McLaren are working to eliminate the unforced errors that cost them points in the early stages of 2024.

This will, of course, be an important part of any future success they have this season.

However, the ambitions at Woking go far beyond this.

Andrea Stella’s aspirations for a winning streak do not include the assumption that Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari will stay within touching distance from race to race.

Instead, the McLaren team principal wants to see upgrades further increase the MCL38’s advantage.

Stella wants to create a big enough advantage that allows for his team to win even in the event mistakes are made, such as Norris and Piastri’s poor starts last weekend.

And with Rob Marshall leading the design team, there appears to be no limits.