The unspoken major factor behind McLaren’s 2024 F1 title win

“Wow” – was initially all McLaren team boss Andrea Stella could muster when Motorsport.com raised the subject of his squad’s bulletproof reliability in Formula 1 2024 ahead of the Abu Dhabi finale.

A discipline as scientific as motorsport does not really leave room for superstition, but the timing of our discussion was complex and so Stella’s brief incredulity was understandable. To be clear, Andrea, we weren’t trying to curse you…

Last Saturday, with McLaren having secured the front two spots on the grid for the race eventually won by Lando Norris – and with constructors’ championship rival Ferrari having one of its cars starting down in 19th thanks to Charles Leclerc’s various misfortunes in the Abu Dhabi event’s opening two days – the papaya team was heavy favourite to wrap up this year’s teams’ prize.

Stella was right to be wary. Not only had McLaren seen Norris slip from a possibly winning position to nowhere in Qatar a week earlier due to the Briton’s main race double yellow flag gaffe, but the subsequent Yas Marina Turn 1 contact between Oscar Piastri in the other MCL38 and Max Verstappen highlighted how precarious its position remained until the race ended.

Indeed, with Leclerc rising from 19th to eighth on the chaotic opening lap, if Norris fell behind chaser Carlos Sainz in the lead Ferrari over the rest of the event, the 14-point swing would have been enough for the Scuderia to steal the constructors’ title.

Also at play was how, at this stage, Piastri’s recovery to a point with 10th was not a given.

But in getting to the finish as its drivers did, McLaren capped its first F1 teams’ title in 26 years with a remarkable record in one critical area.

Oscar Piastri, McLaren MCL38

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

This was how, of all the front-running four teams, it did not have a single reliability drama that cost it points in 2024.

At Red Bull, Verstappen retired in Australia with his brake fire and lost a likely Spa win due to his engine energy recovery system issue back in Montreal practice, meaning he had to suffer a grid penalty.

Also in Canada, Ferrari lost Leclerc to a power unit problem, while at Mercedes engine drama forced DNFs for Lewis Hamilton in Australia and George Russell at Silverstone.

Indeed, McLaren only failed to score points on two occasions this year – when Piastri was in the wars with Sainz in Miami and when Norris came off far worse from that crash with Verstappen in Austria.

Technically, as he stopped in the pits seven laps from the finish, Norris was classified at the Red Bull Ring – ultimately ensuring a zero DNF record for the constructors’ champion in a year where Piastri followed Michael Schumacher in 2002, Lewis Hamilton in 2019 and Max Verstappen last year in completing every single racing lap.

Norris barely squeaked over the 90% race distance threshold required to be classified in Austria, as he had completed 90.1% of the event when he stopped with his MCL38 too damaged to continue after the contact with Verstappen on lap 64.

Stella did – charmingly and in-depth as ever – ultimately respond to our enquiry on just how McLaren had maintained such excellent reliability in 2024.

Lando Norris, McLaren MCL38

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

His answer recalled his previous career experience working as a performance and race engineer at Ferrari, which raised the standard on F1 reliability during its run of five world title doubles with Schumacher during this period in the early 2000s.

“We are in the position we are in terms of the constructor championship, not only because we have been able to realise a car that, on average, was competitive in most circuits, we have [also] had the drivers that have used this car, often, to the best of its potential,” Stella said.

“But definitely from an operational point of view and a reliability point of view the team so far have been able to achieve standards that in my career in Formula 1, they make me think of my early 2000s years at Ferrari, where reliability was kind of a religion and the standards were very high.

“In every Formula 1 team, you don’t achieve these results in an unstructured way.

“This is the result of having invested in this area – operations and reliability – invested money, invested [in] people, [and] changed the organisation in relation to how we deal with the reliability and also the culture.

“With this question, you give me the possibility to make an appraisal of the work and the quality of the work that has happened in this area.