Zak Brown didn’t so much deny the Andrea Stella-to-Ferrari whispers as swat them out of the air with a grin and a rolled-up newspaper.
Asked about the idea of McLaren’s team principal being lured back to Maranello, the McLaren Racing CEO labelled it “total nonsense” and suggested the noise was coming from rivals trying their luck.
“Can I confirm that’s total nonsense? I can confirm that’s total nonsense, and a team or two stirring it,” Brown said. “A great part of our sport is everyone likes to maybe destabilise teams. But that doesn’t work here.”
If it feels like Brown’s been unusually emphatic, it’s because McLaren has spent the last three seasons building something that, in Formula 1 terms, counts as fragile: sustained momentum. Stella has been at the centre of that rise, taking over the top job in 2023 when the team started the year mired toward the back of the grid, then overseeing a turnaround that quickly became the grid’s defining swing.
By 2024, McLaren had ended its long wait for a Constructors’ title — its first since 1998 — and it didn’t stop there. The team retained that crown in 2025, while Lando Norris finally put a drivers’ championship on his CV. It was McLaren’s first drivers’ title since Lewis Hamilton’s 2008 breakthrough, and it landed as the ultimate proof that the operation Stella has run isn’t just fast on its day; it’s structurally strong.
That’s precisely why the latest storyline — Stella out, Ferrari in — never quite fitted the mood inside McLaren. This isn’t an outfit acting like a team that’s bracing for an exit at the top. In fact, it’s just pulled off one of the most eye-catching recruitment moves in recent memory by securing GianPiero Lambiase for a newly created ‘chief racing officer’ role.
Lambiase, the long-time race engineer to Norris’ recent title rival Max Verstappen, is due to arrive no later than 2028. And Brown was keen to underline a point that matters more than any of the gossip: this is Stella’s project, not a corporate reshuffle above him.
“100 per cent. 100 per cent. 100 per cent,” Brown said when asked if Stella and Lambiase will work together as planned. “Andrea, at the end of the day, is the one who hired ‘GP’.”
That detail does a lot of heavy lifting. In F1, you can usually tell how secure a team principal is by what they’re allowed to change — and who they’re allowed to hire. McLaren hasn’t brought Lambiase in as a counterweight to Stella, or as the first piece of a succession plan. They’ve hired him into a senior sporting role that reports to Stella, effectively strengthening the layer that turns performance into points on a Sunday.
Brown has previously described Stella as “the glue” holding McLaren’s operation together, and nothing about this appointment contradicts that. If anything, it reinforces McLaren’s belief that it can keep adding expertise without upsetting the balance that’s delivered two straight Constructors’ titles and a reigning world champion in Norris.
It also gives context to why Brown thinks the paddock is “stirring”. The quickest way to slow a front-running team isn’t always to beat it in a wind tunnel; sometimes it’s to force it into spending weeks answering questions about its own internal stability. Ferrari, given Stella’s history there from 2000 to 2014, is the obvious hook for that kind of story. But McLaren’s message is that there’s nothing to see.
The timing matters, too. Stella has been talking up significant change on-track as F1’s 2026 season continues, teasing that McLaren will roll out what he described as a “completely new car” for the Miami Grand Prix. Even allowing for the occasional paddock exaggeration, it’s not the language of a team principal with one foot out the door — it’s the language of someone setting the agenda and trying to put daylight between McLaren and the field.
For McLaren, the more interesting subtext isn’t whether Stella might one day be tempted by Ferrari. It’s that the team now looks confident enough to be blunt about outside noise — and focused enough to keep hiring as if it intends to stay at the front for the long haul. Brown’s insistence that the rumour is “zero chance” wasn’t just a denial. It was a reminder: McLaren thinks it’s built something sturdy, and it’s not about to let other teams test the bolts.
