How McLaren compares with Ferrari’s early 2000s F1 dominance

From 1999 to 2004 Ferrari won six consecutive Formula 1 constructors’ championships and five drivers’ championships. In 2000 it won 13 out of 17 grands prix; in its most dominant years, 2002 and 2004, it won 15 out of 17 and 15 out of 18 grands prix respectively. The F2004 car set lap records which at many venues lasted for years.

Throughout this era it was dogged by unproved accusations of cheating by rivals who could not match its performance on track.

Does this sound familiar? McLaren’s recent dominance has begun to invite comparison with Ferrari’s last golden era, even down to some of the more elaborate and absurd conspiracy theories circulated by disgruntled competitors.

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella knows what excellence looks like because he joined Ferrari in 2000 as a performance engineer for the test team, then moved up to work for the race team on Michael Schumacher’s side of the garage in 2002. He has described this era as inspirational because it represents the level of competitiveness every team should strive to achieve.

Ahead of last weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix, Stella was invited to compare McLaren’s present level of dominance with Ferrari’s two decades ago.

“I was in a very different role,” he said, “so my field of view, my perspective was very different.

“But if I had to pick a couple of features of the journey that is happening here at McLaren, I would say the rate of progress we have had in a couple of years is in itself pretty unique, and possibly the rate of progress itself was even faster than what we experienced at Ferrari in the very competitive times.

“The second one is that there are no superstars. It’s like a proper team journey, and this includes even the drivers. So, I would say these are the two main features that are peculiar of the journey that we are having at McLaren right now.”

When Stella joined Ferrari it had only recently embarked on its journey back towards competitiveness. Schumacher’s drivers’ title in 2000 was the first for a Ferrari driver since Jody Scheckter in 1979.

The catalyst for change at Ferrari was team principal Jean Todt, who first recruited Schumacher from Benetton then imported the engineering team of technical director Ross Brawn and chief designer Rory Byrne. But as Brawn has often said in the intervening years, the change was one of culture rather than personnel – as Stella says of McLaren now, there were no superstars.

This was partly to avoid high-profile members of staff being targeted for poaching by rivals, but also to protect employees from the excesses of the Italian media. Brawn built a culture of ‘responsibility not blame’, where everyone was invited to submit ideas which might improve performance.

“Everyone was driving each other,” Brawn said in a 2017 interview with this author, published in Autosport’s sister title F1 Racing.

“There was no higher force saying ‘you will succeed or you’ll be in trouble’. What I had been able to get rid of was the blame culture that existed when I arrived. That was the most damaging thing.

“I recall a meeting in the early days when we’d had a glitch, and [Ferrari president] Luca di Montezemolo was about to launch a witch hunt, and I said, ‘We’re not going to have a witch hunt. I’m responsible for everyone so if you want to blame anybody, blame me.’

“The [Italian] media was very prolific, and there was a tendency to want to hang someone out to dry if anything went wrong. Fortunately Jean Todt was very on board with the idea that if you protected people they could get on and do a better job.”

Jean Todt, Team Principal, Ferrari, and Michael Schumacher, 1st position, on the podium

Photo by: Motorsport Images

A tight, motivated team is what underpins McLaren’s current technical leadership, but it has been able to achieve what several other similarly well-motivated and expert organisations haven’t: bring updates that work. This is where, arguably, McLaren has accelerated past early 2000s rate of progress.

“This trend that we have been able to establish,” said Stella, “whereby developments – being from a mechanical point of view, but above all aerodynamic – have been successful, is the result of many factors.

“There’s not much in Formula 1 fundamental for success that is a magic bullet. It’s really the result of working on the fundamentals.

“The fundamentals don’t only involve the capacity to generate ideas, to create the next geometry for a floor or a front wing, but they also involve understanding the methodologies you use for this development. And understanding when these methodologies will be not only effective in being innovative – but also in giving you the confidence that what you have achieved in development in the wind tunnel or CFD will actually transfer into something that works trackside.

“This is part of generating the knowhow as a team, which in itself is a very simple statement: ‘let’s generate the knowhow to have the best correlation’.

“But in reality, this is possibly one of the most complicated battlegrounds for any Formula 1 team. We’ve invested a lot from this point of view.

“I have to praise the quality of the people because even if we talk methodologies, they are always led by people. I’ve been very lucky that I could lean on very competent leaders and a very talented team.”