Rob Marshall: The modest mastermind behind McLaren's rise

18:21, 28 Apr

byLudo van Denderen

Rob Marshall is one of the driving forces behind McLaren's current success. GPblog spoke exclusively with the Briton, who enjoyed great success with Red Bull Racing in the past.

When Red Bull Racing announced in 2023 that Rob Marshall would be leaving the team, team boss Christian Horner initially downplayed it. In short: the team boss felt that there were still enough good people within the Austrian team and that no one person was responsible for success. Moreover, Marshall had not been involved in the day-to-day running of the F1 team for a while, Horner reported at the time.

With Marshall, McLaren has become the benchmark

While Red Bull did not feel Marshall's departure as a loss, it was a victory for McLaren. Coincidence or (probably) not, since Marshall joined McLaren, things have been going up for the British team. In about a year and a half, the team has gone from a mid-field team to the absolute benchmark in the sport.

It’s no wonder that Marshall is in a great mood when he meets GPblog. For anyone who may have doubted it: “I love every day of my job, even the bad days are good,” says the Chief Designer about his current job.

“It's the creative challenge. It's being able to sit down with a problem and then just sketch your way out of that problem, come up with different ideas, some good, some bad, trying to work out which are the good ones, which are the bad ones. Then chatting to people about what they think we could do better, what we could do worse.”

Marshall is a passionate man, obsessed with his work, which often takes place outside the limelight. No one sees how the Briton tries day after day to come up with such inventive solutions that make McLaren take steps forward in terms of performance.

“It's a very fluid process, designing. You have an idea, you wake up in the morning, you go, ‘oh, yeah, must do that’. In fact, we were up last night thinking, ‘oh, hang on, there's something we must do. We need to write it down’. I've already sent some emails off to say, ‘can you have a look at this?’”

Rob Marshall (right)

Marshall accidentally in motorsport

At Red Bull, Marshall was Chief Designer, partly responsible for the successes in the Vettel era, just as he is currently helping McLaren to a new period of glory. Considering his background, this is remarkable, because after his studies he first worked in the aircraft industry.

“I've always been interested in motor racing and cars and planes and anything engineering, really. So I worked in the aerospace industry, which was brilliant. I loved it. I did three years at Rolls-Royce in Bristol. It was brilliant, but you work in a really big company and you look around and there's vast rooms with designers just spread out there like ants in an ant maze. You felt [like] a very small piece of machinery.”

Marshall decided to look further afield when he noticed, among other things, that colleagues were getting paid more, simply because they were older. Then Formula 1 came his way.

“It was significantly better paid, Formula One, so I thought, ‘well, hang on. I'll have a go at that’. So, I did. Didn't work out very well the first time around. But, then I saw an advert in ‘98. An adver in the paper for a motorsport team looking for someone. I applied. That was at Ferrari. Got an interview with Ross Brawn, really nice bloke, met him, had a good chat, didn't get the job.”

But Brawn did send a message along with the rejection: “But he did say ‘you just didn't get the job’, so I thought, ‘if I've only just not got the job, I'll put some more letters out’. So I wrote a few more letters and I got two more interviews and I got a job. Easy.”

A huge challenge at McLaren?

Through Benetton, Marshall ended up at Red Bull and now he's at McLaren. When he joined Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri's team, things weren’t looking so good. “So I was like, ‘well, it's going to be a big job when I get there’. And then I'm watching them for the next nine months thinking, 'this is getting easier. This is getting easier and easier'.”

“Clearly there’s been some internal changes, which I didn't really know about at the time, but for the good, clearly, and not just name changes but sort of attitude changes principle changes, how we're going to go about motor racing, how we're going to go about looking after our people, how we're gonna go out go about extracting the right answers from the right people within the organization irrespective of hierarchy or whatever and then being honest about things in the company that aren't great and that need improving and then going fixing those things."

“And they've done it, without sort of creating a lot of blood, they've just morphed this company into something which is now proper performance chasing F1 team where everyone is literally fully on board with it. The atmosphere in the design office is brilliant and around the factory in general, people laughing, smiling.”

Lando Norris in action with his McLaren

McLaren the sleeping giant

Marshall admits it’s easy to talk when the performance is excellent. But he saw this process unfolding even before McLaren experienced the performance surge. “It's easy when you're having a good year. But i walked in and I'm like ‘yeah’. I've not felt I've needed to recruit anyone else, everyone there fully fit for purpose, some exceptional designers, there's not a weakling in the design office.”

Marshall is modest about his own contribution to McLaren’s resurrection. “I think I've kind of contributed, I hope I have, but it's not really about individual contributions, and truth it's about morphing stuff and not picking your idea, [but] picking the best ideas.”

“When I came I kind of said, ‘well I don't think we're doing a particularly good job of that, let's have a go at one of these’. You draw something out, and then someone goes ‘oh yeah that's a good idea, that fixes that problem’, ‘oh but i've got another way of doing that’, and you go, ‘oh that's even better’."

"And it just kind of snowballs and before you know it you've put something on the car that in the previous year McLaren had been happy with and they thought that was actually giving performance and now you've put something else on and ‘oh, there's a bit of performance there we didn't even really realise we weren't having or weren't benefiting from’."

"So they make the upgrade, it delivers a bit of performance. But really the trajectory of McLaren's performance improvement over the last two years is fairly linear. I don't think there's a sudden change in knee point based on my arrival in January. Anything but. It's all just carried in that direction. It was going in the right way. I've not crashed it, which I'm pleased about!” laughs Marshall.