McLaren shuts down historic F1 'steal' claim

Andrea Stella and Zak Brown have underlined the lynchpin of McLaren's long-term "vision" and continued stability in F1.

The pair highlighted the Woking squad's philosophy of making contracts essentially redundant, though supporting team members and incentivising them with "inherent reasons" to stay at the papaya outfit.

McLaren has just signed Oscar Piastri to a considerable contract extension. The Australian renewed with the team for a reported £20 million per year until 2030 ahead of his home grand prix in Melbourne.

Last month, technical director Peter Prodromou's deal was also renewed. He has been labelled a "key architect" of McLaren's first F1 constructors' championship since 1998.

Those developments prompted Stella to be asked whether the team has witnessed an uptick in rivals trying to pouch staff away.

"We have noticed a certain interest in our people," the Italian told media including RacingNews365. "In fairness, this is a position that doesn't upset us. It's just natural that teams look at acquiring expertise from each other.

"This is even more, if anything, a reason behind our vision for the long-term stability of the team, which applies to our drivers in the most noticeable and most public form.

"It's part of our daily management for myself and for Zak to look at the entire team, the senior people and even the more junior colleagues at the McLaren Formula 1 team to make sure, not only that they are stable from a contractual point of view, but also to make sure that they have inherent reasons to always want to prefer McLaren as the place where they want to work in Formula 1 and achieve important success for the team, but also success at a personal level.

"So it's something you approach from a formal, contractual point of view, but also you approach more substantially in terms of creating the conditions for our colleagues to be willing to stay at McLaren."

Brown: People are not stolen, you lose them

In extension of Stella's comments, Brown dismantled the preconceived notion that sponsors, drivers and employees are stolen from a team.

To his mind, if those things can be lured away, it says more about the team losing them than it does about the operation that has attracted them.

The 52-year-old said it is "more power" to rival F1 teams if they can successfully prise away a sponsor, before expanding on the environment he and Stella have sought to foster in Woking.

"Just building on that a little bit, Andrea is under a long-term contract," Brown joked to laughter from the journalists present.

"But to his point, I think what's important: you hear over the years [that] people steal your sponsors, people steal your drivers, people steal your employees. They don't, you lose them.

"If someone can get a logo off of our shirt, that's on us. More power to them.

"So I think putting aside the contractual element, you want to create - which I think we've successfully done, we don't have a single change on our pit wall this year, we don't have a single change in our technical leadership. We don't have, obviously, any changes in our driver roster, and that's because we've worked very hard to create - an environment where people want to be at McLaren, their families want to be at McLaren.

"And that's something that I think Andrea and I, and the leadership, spend a lot of time on, making it an environment that people want to be at, where we don't have to rely on contracts to have people stay at McLaren."