Heading into the 2025 season, McLaren were deemed the favorites, and it seems they have not disappointed. Their drivers have won five of the opening six races, with Oscar Piastri emerging victorious in four and Lando Norris winning the season opener in Australia.
With such being their purple patch, McLaren have already established a whopping 105-point lead in the Constructors’ Standings from second-placed Mercedes. When it comes to the Drivers’, Piastri currently leads Norris by 16 points, and third-placed Max Verstappen is already 32 points behind the Australian.
With the Woking-based outfit having been so dominant, their drivers have achieved an elite milestone that not even some of their best drivers such as Fernando Alonso and Daniel Ricciardo were ever able to achieve. It has to do with the number of wins in a calendar year.
McLaren’s recent runs of wins began at the 2024 Miami GP last year when Norris won his maiden Grand Prix. Since then, Norris (5) and Piastri (6) have managed to win a total of 11 races over a year’s time. In stark contrast, the team managed just one win in the past 11 years before 2024.
That victory came thanks to Ricciardo at the 2021 Italian GP. Before the Australian’s win, Jenson Button helped McLaren win back at the 2012 Brazilian GP. Since then, drivers like Alonso, Sergio Perez, Carlos Sainz, and Kevin Magnussen have all driven for the Woking-based squad, but have been unable to win a single race.
However, McLaren’s barren run had more to do with the team not being able to deliver a race-winning car. The turn of the turbo-hybrid era in 2014 marked a dramatic fall from grace for McLaren as their engine partnership with Honda went awry.
Their fortunes slowly began to turn for the better when Zak Brown took over as the team’s CEO in 2016, replacing Ron Dennis. The American made some shrewd decisions not only when it came to attracting the best talent to his side, but also when it came to attracting lucrative sponsorship deals.
One top talent that Brown recruited was former Ferrari engineer Andrea Stella. Giving the Italian the responsibility of being the team principal is perhaps the best decision Brown has made since he took the job as CEO.
Despite not having the best of starts in the recent ground effect era, Brown and Stella managed to turn McLaren’s fortunes around in no time. From fielding arguably the slowest car at the 2022 season opener in Bahrain, McLaren managed to produce a car that was regularly fighting for podiums by the 2023 Austrian GP.
A year later, McLaren arguably had the fastest car on the grid, and this pace advantage helped them win their first Constructors’ title since 1998 last season. With McLaren continuing to have the fastest car even this season, it seems likely that they will retain the Constructors’ title.
