McLaren's technical director in charge of aerodynamics Peter Prodromou has signed a multi-year contract extension that reflects how the team is finally maximising a signing it made a decade ago.
Prodromou started his F1 career with McLaren and rose to being its chief aerodynamicist before leaving to join Red Bull along with Adrian Newey. Both were instrumental in that team's rise to being an F1 powerhouse.
When McLaren coaxed Prodromou (below right) back from Red Bull in 2014 as chief engineer, though, there was no repeat of their previous success together - at least, not for a long time.
In fact, it took almost a decade for the team to get as much out of Prodromou as it envisaged. Not until team principal Andrea Stella reimagined the technical structure at McLaren in early 2023, a few months into his reign as team principal.
Privately, senior figures at McLaren described the shift in Prodromou's responsibilities - being made technical director, aerodynamics as part of a three-pronged technical leadership team - as getting him directly involved in aero design work again, rather than being marginalised and more involved in management tasks.
Were Prodromou a more public-facing or publicly lauded technical figure, he would be a totem of the turnaround Stella's McLaren has enjoyed.
McLaren has surged from slipping to the back of the midfield at the start of the new aero rules in 2022 to winning the constructors' championship in 2024. In that time it has started using a brand new windtunnel, and simulator, but these infrastructure projects were not central to the progress the team's technical department made.
The development work in 2023 that laid the groundwork for McLaren's revival was completed using the same Toyota windtunnel in Germany that the team had been using for years, and the bulk of the design team remained the same.
Stella's reworking of the technical leadership, including empowering Prodromou, unlocked latent potential from the existing workforce and facilities. He put a greater emphasis on what could be achieved short-term, which encouraged different concepts to be explored and brought to the car more quickly.
That this was done without sacrificing due diligence, to ensure that new developments like the final floor upgrade of 2024 was introduced without unexpected side-effects, was a testament to the efficiency and creativity that was unlocked - with Prodromou at the heart of it.
He was name checked by Stella in the summer of 2023 for "doing an exceptional job in terms of setting the conceptual direction", while also organising and inspiring the "entire aerodynamic group".
Stella felt that year that there had been "a change of gear" in the effectiveness of the technical team just months after the organisational changes had come into effect. He talked about the capacity to generate ideas and develop them being more "invigorated", which could be measured tangibly in the size and quality of the team's 2023 upgrades.
That McLaren remained on such a strong upwards trajectory in 2024, and now has ambitions of winning both championships in 2025, is validation of that. It also makes Prodromou's renewal entirely expected – as he has clearly re-established himself as the technical lynchpin McLaren hired him to be a decade ago.
