A Formula One team was being poisoned. By biscuits.

Before Andrea Stella became Team Principal, McLaren had a documented pathology. The CEO, Zak Brown, called it poisoned biscuits — grievances passed around without attribution, blame travelling through intermediaries, people quietly marked out in meetings they weren't in.

The team had not won a race since 2012.

The engineers blamed the engine.

The engine department blamed the drivers.

The drivers blamed the strategy.

Everyone was convinced they knew who to blame. 

Nobody said it to anyone's face. The only thing everyone agreed on was that it was not their problem.

Stella's answer was to make feedback itself public, direct, and unflinching.

Uncomfortable questions were asked in debriefs where the entire team could hear the answer. 

Failures were named specifically and attributed to the root cause rather than to the person nearest the failure. 

Drivers were told they could say anything they wanted about the car, the strategy, or the team — as long as it was useful.

At the 2023 Dutch Grand Prix, Lando Norris used team radio to say things about McLaren's strategy that most drivers only say in private.

Loudly.

On broadcast.

Stella went on camera and defended him. 

He called it "what champions do." 

He then said something worth reading twice: "You have to take drivers' comments, make use of them as long as they are constructive, and dismiss all the rest."

At the 2025 Qatar Grand Prix, McLaren chose not to pit under a safety car on lap seven.

The decision cost them the win by almost exactly the margin of a pit stop.

Stella described the strategy as "misjudged" within the hour.

He did not name the strategist.

His description of how the review runs: "When we find the issue, we don't go to the department or the individual and blame them. You empower them to find out why it happened and how to solve it."

This is the camera test at an organisational level.

Describe the behaviour.

Name the impact.

Skip the verdict.

No corridor conversations. No scapegoat produced for the media cycle.

The results followed.

Constructors' Championship in 2024. In 2025, Lando Norris — the same driver whose 2023 outburst did not get him punished — won the Drivers' title.

The feedback you give after your team loses tells them what kind of team they are on. McLaren's feedback told them they were on a team that loses races and learns from them.

That is apparently worth two world championships.