A change in management unlocked the potential within McLaren that has led to its current position at the front of the pack, suggested Nico Rosberg.

McLaren won last year’s Constructors’ Championship to end a 28-year drought in that competition and is on course to add to that success in F1 2025.

Nico Rosberg reveals key to McLaren’s championship-winning transformation

The team enjoyed a strong uptick in form midway through the F1 2023 campaign, coinciding with the arrival of an upgrade package for that year’s Austrian Grand Prix.

That came after team bosses Zak Brown and Andrea Stella, who was only promoted to the team principal role ahead of that campaign, admitted the team had missed pre-season development targets.

It was a turbulent period of the Woking operation as Andreas Seidl departed for Audi before Stella led a restructuring of the squad’s technical department.

That led to James Key’s exit as technical director, with a three-pronged structure put in its place.

According to Rosberg, it is that change which has allowed the team to make the strides it has.

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“There was a bottleneck in management that was too firm on a certain direction,” the 2016 world champion opined in his role as guest pundit with Sky Sports during the Spanish GP weekend.

“Once that person, or those people, moved on, the team was free to be more exploratory and go down a new route.”

While McLaren has introduced a handful of new staff in key positions, such as Rob Marshall as technical director for engineering and design, the team’s core technical staff has remained unchanged.

“It just goes to show that you can have a lot of talent within the team – they’re made up these days, some teams are well over 1000 staff, and then you’ve got the engine department as well, which is the same,” added Anthony Davidson.

“If you bunch all those people together, that can have the talent, therefore, to build a good engine and a good chassis, good aerodynamics. But it’s not useful if you can’t make them work in harmony.

“That’s clearly McLaren’s biggest turnaround. It’s like a football team; you can have individually good players, but if you’re not playing as a team, you’re not going to score goals.

“That’s exactly what McLaren have been able to do.”

After its slow start in F1 2023, McLaren proved to be strong podium contenders by the end of the year.

Again, it was a sluggish start in F1 2024 before the shackles came off in Miami, when Lando Norris claimed his first career win.

Leaving that event with a 115-point deficit to then-Constructors’ Championship leaders Red Bull, the papaya squad clawed back that deficit to win the title by 14 points over Ferrari – with Norris delivering another three victories and Oscar Piastri two of his own.

After nine races in F1 2025, McLaren has won seven, including the season-opening event in Australia, and has moved out to a comfortable 197-point advantage at the top of the teams’ standings, with Ferrari second, six points clear of Mercedes and Red Bull a further 15 away.

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