Mclaren’s impressive revival
The dark days of the Honda partnership are long gone. The clear winner of the 2019 season’s best-of-the-rest ‘Class B’ looks to be a team refreshed and renewed, spurred on by a dynamic young driver line-up
Mclaren’s nightmare finally came to an end in 2019. Its comfortable fourth place in the constructors’ championship represented the best-possible result considering where the team was coming from. New driver line-up Carlos Sainz Jr and Lando Norris excelled and the green shoots of recovery were clear for all to see. There’s a long way to go before it can return to the glory days, but the fug of the Honda era has now cleared and the lessons of last year’s rude awakening have clearly been learned.
Eight times in qualifying and on nine occasions in the race Mclaren ended up as the best of the midfielders, and it would have happened more frequently but for reliability problems and the occasional on-track incident and pitstop errors.
“It’s been a much, much better season. It’s been enjoyable since Australia to come to the race track and know that you’re fighting for points every weekend,” says Mclaren Racing chief executive officer Zak Brown. “The camaraderie among the team, in the garage, is really good. When I started [in 2016] there were a lot of chefs in the kitchen, a lot of stuff going on within the company with shareholders, so there was a lack of focus and direction of the leadership.”
The upshot of this change was a team that was more focused, less wracked with politics and capable of harnessing the prodigious ability of those working within it. The result was clear for all to see on track. Perhaps the most impressive characteristic of the season was that Mclaren made clear developmental progress over the course of the season, mitigating what started off as a front-limited car that also exhibited some rear instability into a very consistent performer. This was thanks to a major upgrade package introduced at May’s Spanish Grand Prix that, with refinement, made Mclaren the midfield leader from the middle of the season. There were even brief flirtations with battling with
“Seidl’s impact, in particular, cannot be underestimated. He’s put effort into getting the team’s rank and file on side”
the big three teams early in races that, while not a sign that the car was at the same level, added a further shot in the arm to a team that’s finally getting its act together.
The reasons for the revival are multifold. The arrival of team principal Andreas Seidl and technical director James Key coincided with this and, although they have had a big part to play in where Mclaren now is, the process started long before they arrived. A big part of what happened in 2019 was thanks to the response to what happened last year and what could be termed the firefighting phase of finding short-term fixes to get the team on an even keel.
“First of all, they made a great step forward with the car over the winter,” explains Seidl. “The car was, straight out of the box, a lot more reliable and a good step in terms of foundation. It reacted to the developments differently to last year’s car, so we could continuously bring updates that worked because we saw the correlation from CFD to windtunnel to track.
“As a team we got better and better throughout the season, which is encouraging and gives us a nice positive momentum.
There are also clear areas where we have to improve. First of all, we need to improve our performance, which we are working flat-out on, to hopefully make the next step next year. But when you analyse the season, we lost too many points with reliability issues and also with issues we had at pitstops, so that’s clearly an area we have to work on as well over winter.”
While Seidl and Key have had a clear influence over the progress this year, their biggest impact has come with the longer-term strategic planning. Decisions such as investing in a new on-site windtunnel, which won’t be online until 2021 at the earliest, and a new driver-in-loop simulator programme show that this is a team that’s kitting itself out to get back to the front.
Seidl’s impact, in particular, cannot be underestimated. He understands how race teams work, has put effort into getting the rank and file on side – something that wasn’t always the case in previous times – and properly get to the bottom of Mclaren’s limitations. By backing his leadership, Brown and the Mclaren board are onto a winner.
“For me and James starting once the season was under way, it made it a lot easier that the team had made already this step with the car performance over the winter,” adds Seidl. “So a lot of credit to Gil de Ferran and Zak, who initiated some of the changes in the middle of last year that we benefited from. That gave us time to really analyse where we see the weak spots in the team and to work on a clear plan of how we want to tackle the future.”
There was also a real air of freshness in Mclaren in 2019, helped by having two drivers delivering strong seasons. Sainz, still only 25 and reveling in the stability of a two-year deal, was the standout performer in the midfield over the year, while rookie team-mate Norris looked immediately at home at this level. Both had their share of misfortune, Norris in particular, but when things went right they were usually to be found at the front of the mid-pack.
Mclaren eliminated any doubt about their futures by confirming in early July that they will remain at the team in
2020 – an important move given that the ghost of Fernando Alonso still haunts the team. Giving drivers stability is usually a good thing, and both responded well.
“One important element of the journey was definitely the
drivers,” says Seidl. “Both Lando and Carlos did a great job. You see it in the car but also outside the car in terms of how they work together, how they work together with the engineers, with the team in the garage, with the team back home, with me. Therefore it was logical and important to have clarity as early as possible in the season, that these two guys are the future also for us as a team.”
Sainz had a shaky start in terms of misfortune in the first three races, failing to score, but once he got on the points board with seventh on the streets of Baku he looked ever more the team leader. As for Norris, he took what would stand as his equal-best finish second time out with sixth in Bahrain and deserved to score more points than he did – in a season where Mclaren had a few too many problems, he often bore the brunt. Norris played the role of exuberant rookie, one with an admirable ability to focus on tackling his weaknesses. Even if he was sometimes too hard on himself, that’s a quality that will stand him in good stead as he aims to kick on next year.
“With Carlos, you could see from the first test last year that he played an important role in the development of the car through the winter and then from the first test onward,” says Seidl. “It was impressive how he pulled off qualifying and also the races.
“Lando had an impressive rookie season, going straight into
Q3 on his first ever Formula 1 weekend. He approached the races in the right way at the beginning of the season; then, once he gained experience, he switched how he was going into the races.
“The starts these two guys are doing are great for them but also for us as a team. We know we cannot jump these top three teams at the moment, but if you can sometimes jump a Mercedes or Ferrari at the start and run two, three laps in front of them, it gives a lot of positive energy for everyone in the team. These are the pictures you’re looking for and you print out and put up at home just to be clear every day of what you’re working for.”
While getting to the front of the midfield is a laudable achievement, now the hard work begins. Mclaren hasn’t been a race-winning team since 2012 and last won a title back in 2008, so cannot rely on its heritage to get it back to the front. Effectively, it must now be regarded as an emerging, growing operation that will have to earn every step it takes towards the big three.
The first test will be making another step forward next year.
The talk is of a concept change, which will be focused on parts of the car into which more potential can be built into so Mclaren can explore key performance areas where it must make progress.
“We would be crazy to go off on a tangent and make something completely different,” says Key. “It’s more controlled where we know there is scope in an area but need to make a conceptual change to release it. The hope is you can consolidate some of the strengths of this year’s car and improve them, then begin to look at other areas where you didn’t have the potential you should have.”
For the first time in a long time, Mclaren is a team on the up. But, most importantly, there are clear signs that this is not just a random spike as the performance of the midfielders fluctuates, but a real step in the right direction. Now, it’s not just optimism and a famous name that fuels the hope it will get back to the front – it’s hard work, good decision-making and a strategy that points resoundingly in the right direction after the harsh lessons have been learned.
“If you can jump a Mercedes or Ferrari at the start, it gives a lot of positive energy for everyone in the team”