McLAREN’S EXTRA BRAKE PEDAL
> THE LATE-NINETIES WAS ANOTHER GOLDEN AGE IN F1,
with Williams, Ferrari and McLaren toe to toe and box office drivers like Hill, Villeneuve, Schumacher and Hakkinen making up a well matched (and decidedly pretty looking) grid.
What this sort of healthy competition usually ensures is an escalation in innovation, something we saw in spades in 1997 with the McLaren Mercedes MP4/12. Engine reliability dogged McLaren for the greater part of the season, but nevertheless the MP4/12 was remarkably quick when it wasn’t in the gravel.
No one could work out where the extra pace was coming from, until F1 photographer Darren Heath spied a rear brake disc glowing red hot at a moment when the car should have been on full gas. On the scent of something, Heath later snapped blindly into Hakkinen’s empty cockpit, producing the now infamous picture above.
What the image revealed to an astonished F1 paddock was an extra pedal in the footwell. Formal enquiries soon established that it was a secondary braking system that allowed the driver to brake either the left or right rear wheel, depending on the circuit, to eliminate understeer mid-corner. Hard on the throttle while riding this pedal, the MP4/12 was significantly faster through the bends than any of its contemporaries – to the tune of half a second a lap.
The idea was simple in concept and execution, and crucially it was completely within the letter of the law. Ferrari, needless to say, went mad, and all the teams began lobbying the FIA on the grounds it would cost them too much to catch up. F1’s governing body rolled over once again, banning the system for the following year. The irony was that McLaren had manged to fit the system with, in their own words: “Fifty quid’s worth of parts that we already had in the truck.”