Inside McLaren’s Rise: From ‘Staring into the Abyss’ to 2025 Champions

When Lando Norris climbed out of the papaya MCL39 under the Abu Dhabi floodlights, eyes red and voice cracking, the roar that rolled down Yas Marina’s main straight felt like the sound of a team hauling itself up from the edge. Two and a half years earlier, McLaren had opened 2023 with six pit stops for a limping car in Bahrain and ninth in the constructors’ standings. They weren’t just off the podium; they were staring into the abyss. What followed was one of the most ruthless rebuilds modern F1 has seen. Andrea Stella’s promotion to team principal was followed by a quiet technical revolution: David Sanchez returning from Ferrari, Rob Marshall poached from Red Bull, and the long‑awaited in‑house wind tunnel finally humming into life in late 2023. The first big upgrade in Austria that summer yanked McLaren out of the doldrums; Silverstone confirmed it, Qatar’s sprint win underlined it. In 2024, the Miami package turned Norris into a race winner and McLaren into permanent front‑runners, a Hungarian 1‑2 – born in pit‑lane politics and hard radio calls – heralding the arrival of the now‑famous "papaya rules" team‑orders code. By 2025 the revolution was complete. The MCL39 became the reference car, ruthless on high‑speed corners and kind to its tyres. Twelve wins from 18 races, seven 1‑2s and the constructors’ crown sealed in Singapore with six grands prix to spare – 650 points, exactly double Mercedes – marked a 10th teams’ title and back‑to‑back championships for the first time since 1991. Yet the drivers’ title was anything but orderly. Oscar Piastri owned the opening act with seven wins in nine and a six‑month stretch leading the standings; Norris surged back as the year wore on. Between them and a lurking Max Verstappen, McLaren’s push for fairness became a weekly tightrope walk: Hungary and Monza swaps, the Silverstone penalty that cost Piastri a home‑of‑the‑team win, the Austin sprint clash, the bruising double disqualification in Las Vegas, even a first‑lap skirmish in Singapore on the very day the team sealed the championship. From the outside it looked combustible. Inside, the tone was different. Team boss Stella talked about a "holistic" reset that dragged Norris out of an early‑season slump – a programme that spanned driving, mindset and racecraft – and insisted both drivers grew by absorbing the pain of Vegas and the Qatar strategy mess without pointing fingers. Piastri, for his part, described his relationship with Norris as "better than it has ever been", stressing that what happens on track stays there, and praising McLaren for identical equipment and rapid, honest debriefs when things boiled over. Zak Brown, meanwhile, doubled down on the pairing, calling Piastri a "future multiple world champion" and revelling in having "two awesome racing drivers" who could fight – and occasionally fume – without tearing the garage in half. Abu Dhabi was the payoff and the warning shot. In a three‑way decider worthy of F1 mythology, Verstappen won the race, Piastri chased him home, and Norris nursed third place – just enough to beat the Red Bull by two points and his own team‑mate by 13, becoming McLaren’s first drivers’ champion since 2008 and the face of its papaya renaissance. For the rest of the paddock, the truly frightening part is not that McLaren dragged itself back from the brink; it’s that they did it while letting two young, razor‑sharp rivals race for the biggest prize without imploding. With a regulation Everest looming in 2026 and both Norris and Piastri still climbing their own peaks, this might not be the end of McLaren’s story of resurrection at all, but merely the end of chapter one.