LONDON, June 1 : Formula One champions McLaren celebrate their 1,000th race on Sunday in Monaco, the Mediterranean principality where they made their debut in 1966.The following looks at the milestone through the eyes of some of those involved over the years:THE FIRST CHAMPIONBrazilian Emerson Fittipaldi will never forget the stress he felt before becoming McLaren's first world champion at Watkins Glen, New York state, in 1974.Show MoreShow LessFittipaldi, who already had one title with Lotus, lined up on the grid for the last race of the season alongside Ferrari's Clay Regazzoni with both level on points and the title at stake. "He was next to me and I was thinking: who's going to be champion? Me or Clay?," he told Reuters. "I only slept three hours before the grand prix... that was the maximum pressure a driver can get. Equal points to the last race."Now 79, Fittipaldi never met team founder Bruce McLaren, who died in 1970, but was proud to have played a significant part in what is now a huge history."At that time, only 38 people on the team and most of them New Zealanders," he recalled."Teddy Mayer was the American owner of the team, he was a very good friend of Bruce... it was a very small team but full of enthusiasm and starving to win the world championship. And I was lucky to be there at that time."THE LATEST CHAMPIONLando Norris won McLaren's 13th drivers' title last year, ending Max Verstappen's four-year reign with Red Bull."My love has always been with McLaren," he told Reuters. "It's always been the team that I've supported since I was a kid and it's a cool story of how it all started."It's what's more close to my heart."Different teams are special for different reasons and McLaren is special for the amount of champions that they've had and the success they've had over the years."THE WINNING DESIGNERNeil Oatley, now 71 and at McLaren since 1984, was chief designer from 1989 to 2003. Cars he helped to create won titles in 1989, 1990, 1991, 1998 and 1999.In his time, the team grew from some 120 people to almost 1,000.Favourite car? "It's a little bit like having your favourite child... I think one of the cars I like most is the 1993 car, which was the last year Ayrton (Senna) was with us," he told Reuters."It was just before they started curbing some of the technical regulations that limited how we could evolve the cars. There were a lot of toys on the car that all the engineers could play with, so it was a little bit of an engineers' playground."Oatley met Bruce McLaren as a boy when the New Zealander was competing at Brands Hatch in the mid 1960s."From that moment he really became a bit of a hero because he was not only a driver but he owned a team and was a good engineer. So all these things rolled into one, almost unthinkable in modern times." THE TEAM BOSSAndrea Stella took over as principal in 2023, after previously serving as racing director."What defines the team today I think is our investment in talent, investment in preserving our values."For us it was very important last year, when we had the possibility to fight for the championship with both drivers, that we race with fairness, with equality, with respect."We want to bring the values that belong to Lando, to Oscar (Piastri), that belong to the team and to our fans. That's what made us particularly proud of being successful last year, the way we did it."