Zak Brown Reveals Andrea Stella’s 5-Word ‘Poison Biscuits’ Mantra to Keep Politics Out of McLaren

McLaren have had a remarkable turnaround in fortunes in the last two seasons. After finishing a disappointing fifth in the Constructors’ Championship in 2022, the Woking-based outfit managed to topple the dominant Red Bull team this year to win their first title since 1998.

As per McLaren CEO Zak Brown, a lot of credit for the same goes to team principal Andrea Stella, who took over the reins of the side from Andreas Seidl at the start of the 2023 season. The one leadership quality that has helped Stella guide McLaren to success, as per Brown, is his ability to keep “politics out of the racing team”.

For that, Brown revealed on the High-Performance podcast that Stella has a five-word mantra — “Don’t eat the poison biscuits”. Stella’s approach involves focusing on his own team and finding ways in which he can guide his side in the right direction rather than looking at the competition and looking for ways to bring them down.

McLaren themselves had to deal with several “poison biscuits” over the course of the 2024 season. One such poison biscuit came about when rival teams tried their best to bring McLaren down by alleging that the Woking-based out were using a ‘mini-DRS‘ to help them defend their positions against others.

However, as Brown stated in his interview, his team focused on the task at hand and this helped them emerge victorious in the end. Brown’s praises for Stella did not end there as he further added how the Italian has a winner’s mindset, which involves a no-blame culture.

The McLaren CEO revealed that Stella does not get angry when one department “might get it a little wrong over the weekend” and in such situations, he instead looks to find ways to boost the morale of the people in that section as they “win or lose together”.

What makes Stella an incredible leader

Although F1 is a team sport and it is a collective effort that helps any side achieve success, sometimes even the best teams fail to achieve their objectives. What these teams need is a leader, who has a good know-how of the different operations of the side and has the ability to motivate people, especially when the chips are down.

Brown believes these are essentially the qualities that make Stella a brilliant leader. The American stated that Stella, being an engineer himself, has a solid understanding of the technicalities and what it will take for the team to improve the pace of their car.

“Because he has a very good technical understanding, when he talks to the different departments he can kind of hear and see it through their lens. He can understand where they are coming from,” Brown added.

Lastly, since Stella leads by example, Brown believes that his team members listen to the Italian as “they know he knows what he’s talking about,” having done it all himself.