Vodafone McLaren Mercedes 2013

[gary123]

well i would like to hear the words that Martin and Sam have to say at this point of the situation! at the begining of the season they said that the mp4\28 had a great potential! these are bull****! the car is a mess! and even worst they are using the 2014 budget to make the car faster... i dont think what is going on in the team in this last times but they are making a lot of mistakes! this season is goNE and it would be much better to think to next season...

[gary123]

Shocking race today, and Mclaren's 64 race points streak ends, wasn't expect it to end at one of Mclaren's strongest tracks.

tonight im pretty sad with the perfomance of the team because we lost a great record! its such a bad thing,because for 64 races we were in top ten... and last year we had the fastest car, that needed just to be reliable...

[JoeE]

I offer no hard evidence, but Sam Micheal is a bloody jinx!



Or maybe am just sick of listening to him talk

He is only person in world who for bad job and leading williams devolopment in wrong direction, giving them one of worst season in their history get promotion job in one of leading championship teams. Two years after establishment in new team, Mclaren from leading championship team become fifth team overall and fight with midfield teams as they follows same mistakes in car devoloping as williams previous years. Maybe is coincidance, but everything begun with Sam Micheal
taking over on sport director role as was in charge during Mclaren started doing pitstop mistake, later even car devolopment mistakes.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the sporting director wouldn't have any input on Car Development so how can you blame that on Sam Michael, if anything it was Paddy Lowe not giving a rats ass and dreaming about Mercedes

No need to be corrected, your right but still once this fella showed up it all went down the pan. Boot needed for this jinxy git

[Racer X]

well i would like to hear the words that Martin and Sam have to say at this point of the situation! at the begining of the season they said that the mp4\28 had a great potential! these are bull****! the car is a mess! and even worst they are using the 2014 budget to make the car faster... i dont think what is going on in the team in this last times but they are making a lot of mistakes! this season is goNE and it would be much better to think to next season...

Well they probably will try to work their arses off atleast till Silverstone so now let's see how they do at home. We've seen plenty of rain races so all teams will be more ten ready for a wet British GP.

McLaren needs to start working on the MP4-29 now like Mercedez last year said they started working on this ears car about race 5 or 6. I don't remember but LOOK at them now. They are so good McLaren should put some effort into next season. But one question do they know the dimensions of the new V6 engines to be able to make a Chassis'? Maybe this is why they are making these moves they can't really start on the new car can they with out some specs on the new Merc Turbo V6? Does anyone know if they have enough infor on those engines to be able to work on next years car?

[Pierce89]

well i would like to hear the words that Martin and Sam have to say at this point of the situation! at the begining of the season they said that the mp4\28 had a great potential! these are bull****! the car is a mess! and even worst they are using the 2014 budget to make the car faster... i dont think what is going on in the team in this last times but they are making a lot of mistakes! this season is goNE and it would be much better to think to next season...

What makes you say they are spending their 2014 budget? If they don't improve, that will hurt their 2014 budget.

[gary123]

well i would like to hear the words that Martin and Sam have to say at this point of the situation! at the begining of the season they said that the mp4\28 had a great potential! these are bull****! the car is a mess! and even worst they are using the 2014 budget to make the car faster... i dont think what is going on in the team in this last times but they are making a lot of mistakes! this season is goNE and it would be much better to think to next season...

What makes you say they are spending their 2014 budget? If they don't improve, that will hurt their 2014 budget.

i read a couple of weeks ago in a italian article that they are using the 2014 budget to improve the 2013 car...well the car has been modified but there is no improvement. every race that passes the car becams slower...in this last two races we saw how the toro rosso became competitive,and we dont need to mention the force india wich is clearly ahed of the mclaren...

[gary123]

well i would like to hear the words that Martin and Sam have to say at this point of the situation! at the begining of the season they said that the mp4\28 had a great potential! these are bull****! the car is a mess! and even worst they are using the 2014 budget to make the car faster... i dont think what is going on in the team in this last times but they are making a lot of mistakes! this season is goNE and it would be much better to think to next season...

Well they probably will try to work their arses off atleast till Silverstone so now let's see how they do at home. We've seen plenty of rain races so all teams will be more ten ready for a wet British GP.

McLaren needs to start working on the MP4-29 now like Mercedez last year said they started working on this ears car about race 5 or 6. I don't remember but LOOK at them now. They are so good McLaren should put some effort into next season. But one question do they know the dimensions of the new V6 engines to be able to make a Chassis'? Maybe this is why they are making these moves they can't really start on the new car can they with out some specs on the new Merc Turbo V6? Does anyone know if they have enough infor on those engines to be able to work on next years car?

i totally agree. lets see what is the competitiveness on silverstone, but a single race dosent means that they should think again for this season...so if they can make a good result in silverstone i would be happy.

[McG]

I found what Niki Lauda told yesterday: Mercedes chairman Niki Lauda said: “We will only give Mclaren information about our engine that they desperately need.”
What can mean?

Mercedes dont want share any secrets for new engine, because they could use in Mclaren that informations for Honda engine devoloping. You know that from next year there will be no partnership between mercedes and mclaren? Mercedes is on former contract with Mclaren obligied to deliver engines to them and nothing more else. Mclaren will not anymore with Mercedes engineers create chassis around their engine to maximize performances, they will only get datas about engine just like any other team who will be supplied from not their main team. For next year Mercedes is only supplier to Mclaren, just like Force India is.

I think that McLaren are gonna have a tough time for the next 2-3 years. Namely due to following reasons.

1) Mercedes will share less and less information with them due to the impending change.

2) Due to their current woes

3) Teething problems with Honda.

I think we need to pull the positives from this situation and look at the long term. If a couple of bad seasons keeps McLaren's future safe in F1 then a true McLaren fan should be happy.

There are a lot of variables but I'm making a fairly educated guess that this is the case!

[WhiteBlue]

[McLaren are getting beaten because everyone else moved forward further.

But their position in the pecking order suggests that they got something wrong on the car and that it involves the chassis which they cannot easily change. Has anybody a real good understanding of the root of the problem yet and is able to explain it in a few words?

[wesley123]

What if there isnt a problem and McLaren just made a bad car?

[stefan_]

"Bad" as in badly thought from the first place, the initial design phylosophy that you build the car around (there are many things that go on a car and we are not seeing) and it turns out that it doesn't work.

[henra]

Has anybody a real good understanding of the root of the problem yet and is able to explain it in a few words?

That is actually a very good question. It appears to me even McLaren themselves are struggling to find the 'Bug' if there is one.
Looking at the car from the outside just some observations without being able to judge if it has to to with their lack of Performance:

They went to a pretty pronounced High Nose design after many, many years of having rather lowish nose designs. That might raise new issues where they don't have a wealth of experience.

They went for a new front suspension type. That - in combination with the former could also pose some new challenges wrt Setup.

The rear of the car is quite bulky. Additionally it doesnt really tell an obvious and consistent philosophy as you see it with Ferrari and RB (although there surely is one - I (and maybe the air as well ) am simply too stupid to understand it)

Looking at the exhaust plume remnants around the bulge they have obviously rather big difficulties preventing the exhaust gases being blown toward the center of the car iso straight back to the diffuser.

As I said theese are just casual observations from an outsider. They do not explain the apparent massive lack of performance though at least some of them might contribute to an unknown extent to it.

[marcush.]

you just cannot judge it from an armchairs position what went wrong with 100% ---
but some things are striking :
Every time a team went for something adventurous it was not really paying off short and medium time .Lotus/Renault with the forward exhaust ,MGP with ultrashort wheelbase ,Ferrari with their pullrod and MGP withtheir fancy blown front wing extravaganza and this year we got Mclaren with a pullrod and Sauber with their narrow sidepods .
It very much looks like : Get a sound basic concept and develop the detail -as RedBull does since 2009 and Lotus has now as well as FI .
Without testing it seems too tall an order to sort out complicated issues .
The ultra stiff front end is exactly the opposite of wat we see from the quick cars which all seem to be very compliant.But then it may well be it´s the peaky aero that dictates the stiff springing .

[wesley123]

The Red Bull was hardly basic when it was launched in 2009, and they too did things that were "special". So there isnt really much a problem in there.

If there is any problem I can think of it is team morale or correlation between the WT/CFD, simulator and real life.

As for morale:
The team last year had pretty much the quickest car, and the quickest driver which was pretty much flawless. They had a huge chance at winning the WDC/WCC, or even better, they were pretty much certain of winning it. But the team just threw it away, and after that they show to be happy with ending up third. If I were just a regular employee of McLAren that would give me a few doubts about what my employees goals are in the championship.

As for the correlation:
McLAren is one of the teams that in recent years often bought updates that were not working as expected, more so than other teams. McLaren is one of the most striking teams in this, since 2010 updates they bring more often dont work than that they do. That is something that you do not want, but it isnt much of a problem.

If we take a look at this year, they havent had that problem, Button even said that the package would bring them great gains according to the simulator if I'm correct. Yet they come in Spain, and they hardly improved, while obviously the sim said something otherwise. So that would lead me to believe that the correlation is off. Certainly with their earlier situation of bringing non working updates, and now with bringing working updates that do not give a improvement.

The last more obvious time that that happened was in 2007, when Honda introduced their RA107, that also had huge aero gains, but in real life, nothing of that was true. And later in the season it was discovered that their windtunnel gave wrong results.

[Racer X]

Their is a huge chance the HONDA Turbo V6 could be amazing. So yes But it still Sad.