Zak Brown Shuts Down the Stella-Out Rumor: Lambiase Is Joining Under Him, Not Replacing Him

Read that how you like.

The current structure keeps Stella where he is, but Brown is clearly thinking about a decade-out succession plan rather than next season’s pitwall.

As for the Ferrari return chatter, this is highly unlikely, and Brown’s comments don’t leave much room for a different interpretation. Jos Verstappen has separately claimed money was a significant factor in Lambiase’s move, which McLaren has not addressed directly.

“I think my job as CEO is to make sure that we have stability and visibility to the future. I think we’ve got a lot of talented individuals that have room for growth,” Brown said.

“He [GP] will be on the racing operations side. Andrea, in reality, kind of has three jobs. I think we sometimes talk about he has two, he actually has three.

“He’s the team principal. He runs the racing team, and he also plays a big role in kind of a technical director capacity. But, you know, Andrea is kind of the glue that brings that together.

“And I think much as the team principal role has evolved over the years, now you’re seeing most teams with the CEO and team principal. Now you’re seeing the team principal role evolve.

“And these teams are so big that if you’re going to be great in all those roles, I think Andrea is very capable of doing two jobs, asking him to do three jobs is a tall order.

“So I think GP will come in and play a great role there and then my job is always to be looking down the road as to who can play and grow within the sport. And so certainly, given GP’s experience and his age, he’s someone I think that can be here for a long time at McLaren and grow.”

Brown’s Culture Pitch Gets Another Airing

The second half of Brown’s media session was the one he’s given a few times now: McLaren when he arrived in 2016 was a miserable place, and it isn’t anymore. He described the Woking factory as literally dark, down to the paint on the cars and the walls, with unhappy drivers, unhappy partners, and a workforce split into upstairs-downstairs factions. The turnaround, he claims, came from unlocking talent that was already there rather than importing a new one.

“Getting everyone in a teamwork environment and the culture that all of the people in the leadership team, obviously, Andrea is the one that’s most visible to all of you. But you know, my head of people and talent, my CFO or commercial department comms, they’ve all done a wonderful job in their respective departments.

“I think when I joined, there was an us in them, upstairs, downstairs, racing team, commercial department.

“Now it’s exciting to see when we do something like a weight-saving exercise, and you start having to kind of modify the vinyl on your race car, as small as that may seem.

“The commercial department gets excited about feeling like they’re contributing to the solution to make the race car faster. So when we went on Sunday, the finance department knows they had a big role in that, etc.

“So when you can get 1400 people, not all of those are on Formula 1, but the predominant amount, rowing the same direction and all understanding how important their role is to our on-track success, it creates an awesome environment we have.

“Wouldn’t want to be as naive as to say we have no politics in here, but I’d say we have very little.”

The subtext is that McLaren has spent the last two years becoming the team that poaches from Red Bull rather than the other way around, and Brown is happy to keep telling anyone who’ll listen exactly why that is.