2022 - McLaren Formula 1 Team

[Holm86]

To be honest, I see a problem not only in the wind tunnel, in recent years, McLaren cars have been very conservative, there were practically no bold and innovative ideas in them. Chassis built by Tim Goss were more progressive, with solutions that set trends and were actively copied by competitors up and down the grid.

Totally agree, Goss ideas were visionary, it was always super interesting to watch the launch of McLaren cars back then, to see what they had come up with. The F-duct, L-shape sidepods, Coanda exhaust etc.
They really have been too conservative lately, not pushing the envelope

[CjC]

Back then in 09-12 Mercedes hadn’t recruited a large portion of Mclarens engineers

Edit:
I also think that it was Mercedes who made Mclaren the midfield team they are today in so many ways. Lack of money for one-which equalled to a lack of investment in the infrastructure but also the poaching of Mclarens staff starting with Lewis Hamilton….

[Wouter]

The Red Arrows are in Abu Dhabi/Dubai this weekend!

You can watch this story for 23 hours.

https://www.instagram.com/stories/rafre ... 576815025/

https://www.instagram.com/stories/mclar ... 581773960/

[dimensi]

To be honest, I see a problem not only in the wind tunnel, in recent years, McLaren cars have been very conservative, there were practically no bold and innovative ideas in them. Chassis built by Tim Goss were more progressive, with solutions that set trends and were actively copied by competitors up and down the grid.

Yes, they are lack of innovation. I really missed the old McLaren days.

[diffuser]

To be honest, I see a problem not only in the wind tunnel, in recent years, McLaren cars have been very conservative, there were practically no bold and innovative ideas in them. Chassis built by Tim Goss were more progressive, with solutions that set trends and were actively copied by competitors up and down the grid.

Like?

[Emag]

To be honest, I see a problem not only in the wind tunnel, in recent years, McLaren cars have been very conservative, there were practically no bold and innovative ideas in them. Chassis built by Tim Goss were more progressive, with solutions that set trends and were actively copied by competitors up and down the grid.

I am afraid I would have to agree.

The wind tunnel should be a limitation when it comes to development rate, but how good the car is at launch, of course there is still a limitation there, but not "2 seconds off the leaders" kind of limitation.

There's obviously a huge design quality deficit to the top teams. The 2021 season for me represents a ceiling of the current McLaren team. They had 3 years to develop that concept, so the development rate deficit was offset by the huge amount of time they had to catch up with the top. The only limitation was the token system which did not allow them to integrate the power unit as well as they might have wanted.

But I doubt the relative performance level would have changed by much even if there were no token restrictions. In terms of design quality, the 2021 car was the most "complete" looking McLaren car in ages when it comes to details. Yet, the ceiling that I mentioned earlier turned out to be "clear of midfield, still a good chunk behind P1".

The top teams manage to come up with "complete" looking designs right out of the box. It was the first year of the new regulations, and yet there is a clear distinction in amount of details the top 3 cars have to the rest of the field.

You could strip all the cars from their liveries at launch, and I am pretty confident I would be able to guess the top-looking concepts. And unfortunately, I would not put McLaren's launch car in that boat.

Now don't get me wrong, sometimes simple looking designs/cars end up being the fastest. But it is one of the very few metrics we have available to judge cars as enthusiast fans. And, as I mentioned, there is a noticable difference in amount of details the top cars have to the rest.

[Ben1980]

Getting tired with livery this and livery that, they all nonsense to me. They should focus on how to build a proper race car.

Probably different departments. And have nonl impact on each other

[ScottR267]

Back then in 09-12 Mercedes hadn’t recruited a large portion of Mclarens engineers

Edit:
I also think that it was Mercedes who made Mclaren the midfield team they are today in so many ways. Lack of money for one-which equalled to a lack of investment in the infrastructure but also the poaching of Mclarens staff starting with Lewis Hamilton….

I’ve seen this quoted a lot about Mercedes poaching McLaren’s staff during this period but apart from Lowe who else was poached?

[RedNEO]

Getting tired with livery this and livery that, they all nonsense to me. They should focus on how to build a proper race car.

Wasn’t that just an artist/fan’s design that got chosen to be on the car?

[mwillems]

To be honest, I see a problem not only in the wind tunnel, in recent years, McLaren cars have been very conservative, there were practically no bold and innovative ideas in them. Chassis built by Tim Goss were more progressive, with solutions that set trends and were actively copied by competitors up and down the grid.

Like?

James Key said as much this season, stating that they considered many of the ideas that they saw on the grid, but chose to keep it simple to start. James actually said that this was a mistake they'd "chided" themselves with.

I'm not sure I'd say that it is the case every year or the team aren't capable of innovating though, I think that is a stretch.

"Beyond that, I think, to be honest, we've chided ourselves a little bit for not being as brave as we could've been.

"Some of the bodywork concepts we had were quite extreme, and actually not dissimilar to what we've begun to see on a few other cars, let's say.

"We figured not knowing these cars very well and committing to something which was extreme in the first year of rags, 'can we be confident we're going to get this right particularly after some of that caught on the back, and so on early on? Have we got time to absolutely be sure?' We ended up a little bit more conservative.
https://www.gpfans.com/en/f1-news/89626 ... id-brexit/

[SmallSoldier]

To be honest, I see a problem not only in the wind tunnel, in recent years, McLaren cars have been very conservative, there were practically no bold and innovative ideas in them. Chassis built by Tim Goss were more progressive, with solutions that set trends and were actively copied by competitors up and down the grid.

Without taking any merit from Goss, at his peak with McLaren, the Team was one of the biggest spenders in Formula 1 (and how much you spend has usually been directly proportional to on track performance)… Keeping away the Honda years, he was in charge of the MCL33, which was probably the worst car McLaren has produced.

[littlebigcat]

BBC Sounds have just released a 8 part documentary on Spygate

Strangely narrated by Pete Tong

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/p0d ... are-mobile

[CjC]

Back then in 09-12 Mercedes hadn’t recruited a large portion of Mclarens engineers

Edit:
I also think that it was Mercedes who made Mclaren the midfield team they are today in so many ways. Lack of money for one-which equalled to a lack of investment in the infrastructure but also the poaching of Mclarens staff starting with Lewis Hamilton….

I’ve seen this quoted a lot about Mercedes poaching McLaren’s staff during this period but apart from Lowe who else was poached?

Phil Prew is another.
I don’t have an extensive list so I could be talking rubbish but I’m sure you know Mercedes went on a massive recruitment drive from having not a lot of staff from the Brawn team to whinging about having to lay people off to meet the budget cap they had that many! Good engineers and designers don’t grow on trees so I’d imagine they were poached.
As Mercedes left Mclaren in 2010 Im just assuming that many Mclaren employees left with them considering that’s where the majority of Mclarens budget was coming from.

[Big Tea]

I always felt that Haug 'had his finger on the pulse' at Mclaren. Dont know his official job title, and I know he was Merc more than Mclaren, but when he said something it was always concise.
Don't know what happened to him? Did he move on/up with Merc?

[diffuser]

To be honest, I see a problem not only in the wind tunnel, in recent years, McLaren cars have been very conservative, there were practically no bold and innovative ideas in them. Chassis built by Tim Goss were more progressive, with solutions that set trends and were actively copied by competitors up and down the grid.

Like?

James Key said as much this season, stating that they considered many of the ideas that they saw on the grid, but chose to keep it simple to start. James actually said that this was a mistake they'd "chided" themselves with.

I'm not sure I'd say that it is the case every year or the team aren't capable of innovating though, I think that is a stretch.

"Beyond that, I think, to be honest, we've chided ourselves a little bit for not being as brave as we could've been.

"Some of the bodywork concepts we had were quite extreme, and actually not dissimilar to what we've begun to see on a few other cars, let's say.

"We figured not knowing these cars very well and committing to something which was extreme in the first year of rags, 'can we be confident we're going to get this right particularly after some of that caught on the back, and so on early on? Have we got time to absolutely be sure?' We ended up a little bit more conservative.
https://www.gpfans.com/en/f1-news/89626 ... id-brexit/

Well Alpine were conservative to start. They didn't have models for the floor. Nobody was sure how that stuff was gonna play. I've said this before but the brakes set McLaren back 4 to 8 weeks at the beginning of the year. They had to throw away money on it and then they ran out of CAP before they caught up.