Zak Brown didn’t sign Gianpiero Lambiase to start a game of musical chairs at the top of McLaren. He signed him because modern F1 team structures are creaking under the weight of what the job has become — and because, in Brown’s eyes, Andrea Stella has been doing too much of it for too long.
Lambiase, long one of the most recognisable voices on the pitwall thanks to his near-decade as Max Verstappen’s race engineer, is set to join McLaren’s racing operations group as Chief Racing Officer. The key line in Brown’s confirmation wasn’t the title, or even the timeline (his contract ends “no later than 2028”). It was the reporting line: Lambiase will report to Stella, with Stella remaining team principal.
That matters, because the paddock’s first instinct with any high-profile hire is to hunt for the hidden succession plan. In this case, the whispers were neat and familiar: Lambiase arrives, Stella exits, and the Italian heads back to Ferrari. Brown has now put that to bed, insisting Stella’s role is unchanged and describing him as the central piece holding McLaren’s competing demands together.
“Happy to share that GianPiero Lambiase will join the McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team as Chief Racing Officer, reporting into Team Principal Andrea Stella, when his contract ends no later than 2028,” Brown said. “He joins an incredible team under Andrea’s leadership and I’m excited about what we can achieve together.”
What McLaren are really doing here is acknowledging the uncomfortable truth about the team principal role in 2026: it’s no longer one job, or even two. Brown framed Stella’s current workload as three roles rolled into one — the public-facing leadership position, the day-to-day running of the race team, and a substantial technical leadership contribution.
In other words, Stella isn’t just steering the ship; he’s also calling the tactics and spending time below decks making sure the engine room is turning over. That’s a lot to ask when the margins are small and the calendar never lets up.
“Andrea, in reality, kind of has three jobs,” Brown said. “He’s the team principal. He runs the racing team, and he also plays a big role in kind of a technical director capacity… asking him to do three jobs is a tall order.”
So Lambiase isn’t being positioned as a rival power centre. He’s being brought in as a pressure release valve — someone with the credibility to take ownership of the racing operation side without undermining the leadership above it. It’s also an interesting choice of profile: not a conventional team principal-in-waiting, but a figure forged in the sharp end of decision-making, communication, and execution, where reputations are made and lost in half-seconds.
Brown didn’t hide that McLaren are thinking long-term, either. Lambiase’s “experience and his age” were both cited as reasons McLaren see him as someone who can be embedded for the long haul and grow with the organisation. That reads less like a ticking clock on Stella, and more like a hedge against how brutally this sport punishes teams that don’t plan leadership depth.
It also fits with Brown’s broader view of where F1 teams are headed — towards the kind of corporate layering we’ve seen increasingly normalised: CEO above, team principal below, and then specialised senior operators with clear remits instead of one all-consuming figure expected to be strategist, diplomat, politician, engineer, and HR buffer all at once.
Alongside the organisational argument, Brown took the opportunity to sell another part of the McLaren story: culture. He described arriving at Woking to what sounded like a team not just losing on track, but carrying the mood of it in the building — “dark” in tone, in aesthetic, and in mindset. The point he made was that performance is rarely just about hiring faster people; it’s about getting the same people pulling in one direction, without the suspicion and siloed thinking that can calcify inside a struggling operation.
“I think about my first day joining, it was a dark environment… you could feel it was a cold environment. It wasn’t a happy environment,” Brown said. “Our partners weren’t happy, our drivers weren’t happy… A lot of conspiracy theories running around.”
Brown argued that McLaren’s evolution since then has been about unlocking talent by making the place more functional — and, importantly, more enjoyable. He painted a picture of a team now willing to celebrate marginal gains across departments, where even non-racing groups feel connected to lap time. The example he picked was tellingly mundane: a weight-saving push that required changes to the car’s vinyl, and how the commercial side took pride in being part of the solution.
That kind of detail is what teams lean on when they’re trying to explain why they’re able to recruit, retain, and integrate elite personnel. Brown even nodded to the obvious caveat — that politics never disappear in an organisation of this size — but insisted it’s limited.
“Wouldn’t want to be as naive as to say we have no politics in here, but I’d say we have very little,” he said.
There’s a subtext to all of this, too. In an era where senior hires are constantly interpreted through the lens of instability elsewhere, McLaren are selling the opposite: a team building a deeper bench because it expects to be fighting at the front for years, not because it’s bracing for an internal rupture.
Lambiase’s arrival won’t be immediate, and when he does show up, the easy reading will still be to view him through the prism of what he was at Red Bull — a voice in a driver’s ear, a calm head amid the noise, the human interface between car, driver, and pitwall. But McLaren aren’t paying for nostalgia. They’re paying for operational sharpness, and for a structure that keeps Stella doing what McLaren believe he does best: being the glue, without having to carry the whole model on his shoulders.
