WACKY RACERS
McLaren THREE seconds off the pace, lurching from crisis to crisis
THREE seconds, or a Formula One eternity, separated Lewis Hamilton in pole position from the cars belonging to his old team, a comedy club called McLaren.
The upshot of their humiliation ahead of the French Grand Prix — Fernando Alonso qualified 16th and Stoffel Vandoorne 18th, both eliminated in the first session — is that Eric Boullier’s position as racing director is untenable.
Briefed against by his colleagues, disrespected by his staff, the Frenchman appears certain to go after five years of clapped-out excuses.
Boullier ( below) was pulled from his media duties post-qualifying yesterday, pathetically. But chief executive Zak Brown, asked if Boullier would make it to the end of the season, was tellingly cryptic, saying: ‘I’m not goi ng i nt o personnel changes. Clearly, we have to identify why we have missed this year’s development targets on the car.’
One question is whether Alonso, who yesterday was slower in a McLaren than Marcus Ericsson in a Sauber, will want to stay next season. Another is if it would strangely help McLaren if he went.
He earns £20million and McLaren’s hierarchy are bending to his every whim — if he wants to do Le Mans, he does it; if he chooses to take on the Indianapolis 500 next year, he will. Why not bank the money and plough it into wider improvement rather than on a superb driver who is wasted in a shocking machine? The problems are wide and deep-seated.
The enthusiastic Brown cannot be held responsible for the car’s substandard performance, as that was not his direct responsibility until a rejigging in the management structure in April. But his tin ear to the chorus of concern coming from within the factory over the team’s direction, and his maladroit reaction this weekend to reports of that dissent, raise serious doubts over his suitability to perform an overhaul that could take a minimum of five years.
He is not an engineer. He is a marketing man, and even in that area he has largely failed to deliver since joining McLaren in November 2016. There is no title sponsor, though that was his initial stated ambition. McLaren’s budget is shrinking, talent is draining away. Perhaps worst of all, too many of the managers are protecting their own jobs. The car and team are secondary concerns for some.
Who to bring in? Only one man can sort it out. Christian Horner, the Red Bull team principal. He might be taken away in white coats before he accepts the job from hell. But what if he were handed equity in the team over a number of years? He would also need an eye-watering pay check and carte blanche to revolutionise the culture with new staff in key senior management positions.
The one person staff had respect for was German engineer Jost Capito, a successful former director of motorsport at Volkswagen. He listened to the workforce. But he was an early victim of t he Brown regime’s 19- month spell, falling prey to the self-protecting instincts of those who felt threatened by him.
Staff have since grown disgruntled with those leading them. Last week, an anonymous staff member called his superiors ‘clueless’ and explained how he and his colleagues felt insulted by the award of 25p chocolate Freddo bars for their gruelling work. He called four staff members ‘Untouchables’ — Boullier, Matt Morris, chief engineer, Simon Roberts, chief operating officer, and David Probyn, operations director. Brown originally told me he wanted to hear more about the discontent — who was saying what — so he could better understand what people may be wary of telling him to his face. But when he read the story, he buried his head in the sand. He dismissed the ill-feeling as ‘a few rotten apples’. Really?
Jonathan Neale, the managing director, sent out a panic email to all 800 staff criticising the source of t he l eak. He t ore i nto t he employee, basically accusing him of cowardice. Again, it was a case of lashing out rather than listening and learning.
This mess is a world away from the team that nurtured Hamilton when it was byword for near-perfection. Here yesterday, the alumnus of Woking qualified in pole a tenth of a second quicker than his Mercedes team-mate Valtteri Bottas with Sebastian Vettel third for Mercedes, nearly four-tenths adrift of Hamilton.