McLaren underwent a significant internal transformation to return to competing at the top in Formula 1. According to Randeep Singh, the team’s racing director, the leadership change helped create an environment without a ‘blame culture’.
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The Woking team faced a performance decline in the early years of the turbo-hybrid era, a period that also marked the end of Ron Dennis’s long management, who left the position at the end of 2016. In 2018, Zak Brown took over as CEO and started a new phase, while Andrea Stella arrived as team principal in 2023, initiating a strong rise that culminated in a season with two titles last year.
For Singh, the current structure has given McLaren members more freedom to perform their roles without fear of being individually held accountable for mistakes: “The main thing is that the leadership changed with Andrea and Zak, and I think that simply empowered everyone to do their jobs,” he told Sky F1.
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The director highlighted that this attitude is especially important in high-pressure areas, such as strategy, where decisions are made based on probabilities and can result in mistakes: “There is none of that here. You just keep trying to evolve. You don’t worry if there is a bad result,” Singh continued, adding that a wrong decision is analyzed so the team understands what happened and can improve.
Singh also emphasized that the same approach is applied regardless of the race results: “Good things, bad things, and you treat everything the same way. That really empowers people,” he concluded. For the director, this environment allows McLaren members to focus on the continuous improvement process, without individual mistakes creating an internal pressure atmosphere.
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