SPOILSPORT MCLAREN

Cars to lose ‘shark fins’ next year due to Brown’s non-cooperation

FORMULA One cars are set to lose their prominent engine cover ‘shark fins’ next season after McLaren failed to back other teams hoping to retain them.

The removal of the aerodynamic features was agreed earlier in the year but underwent a rethink, according to Red Bull team boss Christian Horner, as teams sought a place to display driver numbers.

“In usual fashion we left the meeting and things changed,” Horner told reporters at the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, blaming McLaren executive director Zak Brown, who had wanted his car’s rear wing to be more visible.

“He’s obviously signed a major sponsor for next year that he’s trying to get as much coverage as he can for, so McLaren presented another variant,” said Horner.

“The problem is the aerodynamicists then looked at it and said ‘well that screws up the rear wing so we don’t want that.’ So I’m not quite sure as we sit here what we’ve got. I think it goes back to what’s in the regulation, which is no fin.”

Brown — a marketing expert — said the team had secured two as-yet-unannounced new sponsors, one of them US-based, and defended his stance.

The rear wing, he said, was an important part of a team’s real estate when it came to sponsors.

“We don’t think enough commercially about some of the technical regulations that we discuss. If you look at today’s race car, front wings are no longer commercially viable,” he said.

“We’ve got bargeboards and aerodynamic devices blocking the chassis side and we’ve got this big engine fin that blocks the rear wing. So that was really more of a case of starting to free up some commercial locations on the race car.”

The fins, emanating from the airbox above the driver’s head, were introduced this season and caused an immediate controversy.

Horner was one of the early critics, saying at the launch of his team’s new car in February that the sport had put aerodynamics before aesthetics.

“It’s going to complicate matters slightly,” said Force India technical director Andy Green.

“It means we have to redevelop part of the cars which hasn’t been developed because we assumed the engine cover was going to stay the same.

“It’s not a big thing, but it’s still something we have to do that we didn’t think we would have to do.”

A gold topped Lewis Hamilton topped the times with record speed on Friday as he and Sebastian Vettel traded fastest laps in second practice of the seasonending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

As both men and their Mercedes and Ferrari teams set about claiming the early momentum in a ‘development war’ race ahead of the 2018 season, Vettel conceded that he was racing already as if it was a new year.

“We try stuff all the time to improve the car — not specifically for next year — but everything we tried the last two weeks is for next year,” he said. “The mind-set is that we are already in next year.

“It’s important to finish on a high. The better the result, the better the mood. We will try our best, but in our heads I think we are already thinking about next year's car.”

Hamilton reeled off his track record lap as he topped the times for Mercedes ahead of Vettel’s Ferrari in the twilight second free practice.

The newly-crowned four-time world champion Briton clocked a best lap of one minute and 37.877 seconds to outpace German Vettel, also a four-time champion, by one-tenth of a second in a session that began in sunlight and finished after dark. Agencies