McLaren CEO Zak Brown has pointed towards the FIA's intervention over engine parity as a key reason behind the team's 2024 title success.
In 2018, F1's governing body stepped in to ensure that power unit suppliers must supply works and customer squads with the same specification of power unit, including access to different modes.
In the first four years of the turbo hybrid era, some customer teams did not have access to the same settings as the works team, which was stamped out in the intervention.
As such, in 2024, McLaren became the first team in the turbo hybrid era to win a championship as a customer team - and the first since Brawn in 2009 with the titles since split by a quasi-works Red Bull-Renault, Mercedes and then Red Bull-Honda/RBPT.
Reflecting on the situation, Brown feels the move in 2018 has brought "total parity."
"I think the biggest change, which has brought total parity is that your engine mapping has to be the same," he told select media including RacingNews365.
"That was the differentiator between a works team and a customer team, there were all these different power modes we have that did not have to be the same.
"As soon as that rule came in, I was totally confident that you could take the engine out of Lewis [Hamilton's] car, and put it in Lando's car and vice versa. It is the same power unit.
"Where the works team gets an advantage is they just have a little bit more awareness of the packaging of the engine, so when they get into designing their car, they'll get a little bit of a head start of packaging and design.
"But we proved that if you do a great job, you can overcome that."
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