McLAREN STILL BUILDING FOR ITS TITLE CHALLENGE

Any time you visit the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking, it’s impossible to come away without being deeply impressed by the team’s rich and successful history. Lining the main boulevard on the ground floor are cars that have amassed victories and championships across Formula 1, IndyCar, Can-Am and Le Mans. If you walk a little further towards the canteen, the walls are lined with trophy cabinets, ensuring that every McLaren employee can see the success the team and company have been built upon.

But for a long time, the trophy cabinets didn’t need to be opened for any new additions. McLaren went through an incredibly lean period, failing to record a single F1 podium finish between the 2014 Australian Grand Prix and Carlos Sainz Jr’s run to third at Interlagos in 2019. In that time, the team underwent significant changes in ownership, management, engine supplier and drivers, but at last had some silverware to show for it.

The floodgates didn’t exactly burst open, yet it set the tone for more success. Two podiums followed in 2020, before last year McLaren finally returned to the top step through Daniel Ricciardo at Monza, leading home a 1-2 finish ahead of Lando Norris, who himself scored three further podiums in 2021. Ricciardo’s McLaren MCL35M now sits at the entrance of the MTC’s boulevard as the first grand prix-winning McLaren for almost nine years.

It all feeds into the question of ‘what next?’ For a team that established itself as a serial winner across four decades in F1, while podiums and wins undoubtedly can and should be celebrated, they’re not the endgame. That’s not what Zak Brown, the CEO of McLaren Racing, signed up for when he took over the reins at Woking in late 2016. The ambition was always to build McLaren back up and make