2025 McLaren F1 Team

[venkyhere]

Look where the discussion started (conflicting takes on who had the fastest car in Brazil GP 2025) and where it went (which drivers in the past and present have the biggest egos, toughest teammates etc etc).

Anyway, getting back to the topic :

Nope, not having that. Its probably recency bias. I can't see how anything comes close to a car winning 21/22 races, and smashing it at all tracks. And demolishing the opposition.
I'm not sure anything will come close to that achievement for a long time, if ever.

Regarding the previous comment, the pure performance doesn't matter much in my opinion. It's only natural that cars will get faster every year assuming we remain within the same regulation cycle. We don't consider the F2004 one of the most dominant cars of the sport only because the F2004 was the fastest car of its regulation cycle. We consider it dominant because it had no rivals in 2004.
From that perspective, to evaluate how "dominant" a car is, you only look at the relative performance.

I never used the word 'dominant' in my post, I was not talking about a car's performance relative to competition in any given year (I thought I made it amply clear to you guys) - I am talking about absolute performance tending towards the theoretical limit possible from a regulation cycle. Remember the 'law of diminishing returns' which tends to be asymptotic in nature ? where the next 1% performance is harder to achieve than the previous 1% achieved last year ? (asymptotic) - in that regard, what McLaren has achieved with the McL39 is simply shifting the goalpost to a whole new level, from the RB19 of 2023 (I am not even contesting that the RB19 was the most dominant car in the history of F1 since the current points format began).

So when there is more theoretical performance in the car (the new goalpost), what does it enable in the driver ? It allows the driver to be that much faster, if he has the talent to put the car near it's theoretical limit, with his driving. In other words, if the RB19 scores 95, the McL39 scores 98. It would have been less hard for other teams to 'develop' their car to hit the 94/94.5 and be close to the 95 ; compared to the super-hard task of developing their car to achieve 96/96.5 and still be far away from 98. That's why I said the McL39 is the 'car of the ground effect era' - it has no weakness, not just in relative terms to competition, but in absolute terms relative to the whole 4 years. It's a herculean task for other teams to get near it, and the only way some other car looks faster in a particular GP is because drivers/operations/car-setup has been suboptimal 'using' the McL39, in that particular race.

Absolute performance, is super important, because to the ones who have more of it, they enjoy a nice advantage, as it's that much harder for others to be near 'more absolute performance', given the asymptotic nature of getting near to it. The performance curve is not linear, it's "limit - exponentially decaying" (like DC charging a capacitor) :

present = target (1 - (e^-k))

And calculating 'performance' from the pace of the race leader (in any race) where he doesn't have anyone with 7-8s of him throughout the entire race (apart from the first 10-15 laps where he needs to build this time-buffer) , is fraught with inaccuracy. That's because he has to always be in some kind of management to preserve his tyres, because he doesn't know when there will be a safety car and he can't afford to lose track position for a cheap tyre change, and needs some life left in them for a rolling restart.

[megasyxx2]

stop that discussion, the MP4-18 is greatest ever car, bar none

[Darth-Piekus]

Dont make fun of the MP4-18. I liked that car. If that car came out as it should be without reliability problems it would have been an unbeatable force.

[Emag]

I never used the word 'dominant' in my post, I was not talking about a car's performance relative to competition in any given year (I thought I made it amply clear to you guys) - I am talking about absolute performance tending towards the theoretical limit possible from a regulation cycle. Remember the 'law of diminishing returns' which tends to be asymptotic in nature ? where the next 1% performance is harder to achieve than the previous 1% achieved last year ? (asymptotic) - in that regard, what McLaren has achieved with the McL39 is simply shifting the goalpost to a whole new level, from the RB19 of 2023 (I am not even contesting that the RB19 was the most dominant car in the history of F1 since the current points format began).

So when there is more theoretical performance in the car (the new goalpost), what does it enable in the driver ? It allows the driver to be that much faster, if he has the talent to put the car near it's theoretical limit, with his driving. In other words, if the RB19 scores 95, the McL39 scores 98. It would have been less hard for other teams to 'develop' their car to hit the 94/94.5 and be close to the 95 ; compared to the super-hard task of developing their car to achieve 96/96.5 and still be far away from 98. That's why I said the McL39 is the 'car of the ground effect era' - it has no weakness, not just in relative terms to competition, but in absolute terms relative to the whole 4 years. It's a herculean task for other teams to get near it, and the only way some other car looks faster in a particular GP is because drivers/operations/car-setup has been suboptimal 'using' the McL39, in that particular race.

Absolute performance, is super important, because to the ones who have more of it, they enjoy a nice advantage, as it's that much harder for others to be near 'more absolute performance', given the asymptotic nature of getting near to it. The performance curve is not linear, it's "limit - exponentially decaying" (like DC charging a capacitor) :

present = target (1 - (e^-k))

And calculating 'performance' from the pace of the race leader (in any race) where he doesn't have anyone with 7-8s of him throughout the entire race (apart from the first 10-15 laps where he needs to build this time-buffer) , is fraught with inaccuracy. That's because he has to always be in some kind of management to preserve his tyres, because he doesn't know when there will be a safety car and he can't afford to lose track position for a cheap tyre change, and needs some life left in them for a rolling restart.

You can’t really quantify how close any car is to the theoretical limit of the regulations. Those percentage figures are just guesses. In 2023, Red Bull’s rivals weren’t necessarily “further” from the limit because they were incompetent. They were chasing the wrong concepts, ones we now know didn’t work as well under these regulations. And even then, no team actually knows what the real ceiling is, they only know where their own weaknesses lie. The idea that one can precisely measure “how close” a car is to perfection simply doesn’t hold up in practice. I guarantee you, if you give these teams another year to improve these cars, they will somehow find another second on them. It's impressive enough they did it from 2024. And thats with cars that look, to the naked eye, 95% identical to their predecessors.

At this point, what limits performance isn’t so much aerodynamic or mechanical potential, but tyre behaviour. The tyres have been the biggest unknown of this era, and a car that looks perfect in theory can easily struggle if it slips out of the tyre window. And if the McLaren were truly as close to perfection as claimed, you wouldn’t see it beaten in a third of the races by cars supposedly much further from that limit. That alone shows that any “absolute” advantage it holds is still very much conditional and far from indisputable.

As for the race-pace part, yes, leaders often manage tyres, but that doesn’t mean they’re cruising around with a lot of pace per lap in reserve. Drivers almost always use whatever pace is needed to stay strategically safe. That includes building a gap for pit stops, covering undercuts, or responding to pressure. If they’re not pulling away more, it’s usually because they can’t without hurting tyre life or risking balance, not always because they’re holding back huge chunks of performance.

My point is, you can’t just assume a driver who wins by 10 seconds “could’ve won by 20” if he wanted to. These ultimate pace calculations with comparisons between different drivers are as statistically significant as using ideal sectors between both drivers to calculate the "theoretical lap time" potential of a car.

[Darth-Piekus]

I miss the old Bridgestone, Goodyear and Michelin tyres. Where you could go hammer time for 20 laps to build a pit stop distance. Now we have softs who can't hold up half a lap.