Victorious in the 2024 F1 Constructors’ Championship, McLaren have discovered the value of good luck as the FIA has slapped them with a massive payment for access to next year’s championship.
McLaren won its first Constructor’s title since 1998, beating Ferrari by thirteen positions, while Lando Norris took the final victory of the season at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix before Ferrari’s double podium finish.
The Woking team scored 666 problems in total, thirteen more than Ferrari and 77 more than last year’s constructors’ champion Red Bull.
But the downside to McLaren’s celebration is a sharp increase in their entry fee for the F1 2025 World Championship.
For 2025, the base pay for all 10 will be $680,203, but then there will be an additional $8,161 charge for points scored for constructors’ champions. The other nine pay just $6,799 per point.
That means McLaren’s entry fee for next season is $6,115,429, just over a million more than Ferrari have to pay.
The good news for McLaren is that by winning the teams’ title, their 2024 prize money is $140m to Ferrari’s $131m.
As for Red Bull, its access payment amounts to $4,684,814, compared to $7,445,817 this year after the record 2023 campaign. But his prize money has also dropped, reduced to $122 million.
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For McLaren team boss Andrea Stella, the $6. 1 million is the reward.
“Definitely, since I joined McLaren, at the end of the 2024 season, celebrating a championship, we have almost come full circle,” he told the media, adding to PlanetF1. com.
“I have told the team that in the first race of 2015 in Australia, between our lap in Q1 and pole position, there were five seconds, 3 seconds for the fastest lap in Q1 and five seconds for pole position. And we got to the end.
“We have come to the end thanks to wonderful resilience, thanks to wonderful conviction. I would like to thank in particular Zak Brown, Paul Walsh and all our shareholders for their confidence in the update that they have implemented and have put McLaren in a position privileged, very strong position from the point of view of control.
“And when you are strong from a control point of view, when you trust yourself, when you start making the necessary investments, then you can be competitive. You can compete at the top.
“I think the final bit of this circle if you want to, came through the people, unlocking the people. I’m not sure if it’s something that you who listens can actually appreciate what it means if you are not part of seeing such a rapid progress of 1000 people, but that’s what has happened because you cannot, cannot achieve these standards, these performance, these operations, this reliability, without every one of the 1000 people operating at very high level.
“This is what we have experienced those 10 years at McLaren. But I hope it’s not an end point, but just a starting point for other things to come in the future. »
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