MCLAREN’S RENAISSANCE
It’s been a long road back, but Mclaren is on the up again
When
Mclaren last won a grand prix, the world was a very different place. One Direction sat atop the US album charts. Google Plus still existed. Shares in Facebook were a snip at $23.99 (in August 2020 they reached $303.91). Felix Baumgartner had just demonstrated the thrilling extent of human endeavour by jumping from the edge of space. There was a James Bond film in the cinemas. You could still buy a Blackberry, and people were. Donald Trump was arguing against a recount in the US election. It was 25 November, 2012. Third in the constructors’ championship with the spoils of seven race victories jostling for space in its amply stuffed trophy cabinet, and with the feeling that better reliability might have earned Lewis Hamilton or Jenson Button the drivers’ title, Mclaren was already in the process of failing. A gearbox breakage in Singapore, caused by sand left over from the casting process, provided the final nudge for Hamilton to sever his ties with the team which had nurtured him since karting. In the design office, work proceeded on the MP4-28, a car which would only demonstrate competitive pace once, at a pre-season test, and then only because elements of the front suspension were accidentally fitted upside down.
Several seasons in the competitive wasteland followed, the result of complacency, hubris, technological over-reach, and out-of-touch leadership. During the French GP weekend of
2018, a British tabloid newspaper published an excoriating exposé of management practices at Mclaren, centring around the use of inexpensive confectionary as an incentive. ‘Freddo-gate’ painted a picture of a leadership both out of touch with and despised by the factory floor – why else leak to a newspaper? – and it prompted many of the changes bearing competitive fruit today.
Two years later and Mclaren has fought its way into top three contention for the first time since 2012, but now it’s on a different trajectory – an upward one. It remains proud of its history as one of Formula 1’s most competitive teams but is no longer blinkered by it. The process has been painful – casualties include Ron Dennis, the architect of modern Mclaren – but this is a team which now has its sights set realistically on race victories in the future.
It was incredibly important that Mclaren demonstrated solid progress in 2020, its first season with a car developed under recently installed technical director James Key, and superintended by team principal Andreas Seidl, who joined from Porsche in May 2019. These were early days for an organisation still in the process of change after the bout of bloodletting which followed Dennis’s removal in a November 2016 boardroom coup. But Mclaren had been in the business of making excuses for too long in this decade, and there was already evidence of improvement: the 2019 MCL34 car, designed with input from former chief engineer Pat Fry – on a short-term consultancy contract while Key served gardening leave from a previous role – eliminated many of the weaknesses of its predecessor. The MCL35 needed to continue this trend, and the initial signs were good.
“In the Barcelona test we could clearly see with the car, in terms of the improvements we wanted to achieve, solving some of the weaknesses from last year, that we’d definitely made a step forward,” confirms Seidl. “Even not knowing what the competition was doing.
“We could also see we’d taken a big step in reliability compared with previous seasons, which was a nice reward for the hard work done back home, as well as by the race team. Because that was very much a weakness in previous years, and we could see both in the mileage and the laptimes that we’d had a good test.
Also, the figures we expected to come from the development we could actually measure on track. So, we left with a positive feeling.”
Curious as it may seem in retrospect, at that point the spread of COVID-19 was still not being treated with the gravity it merited. Mclaren was the only team to insist all visitors to its Brand Centre sanitise their hands. As testing ended, the biggest story on the news agenda was the FIA’S ‘confidential settlement with Ferrari’. The onset of the pandemic revealed a great deal about the state of Mclaren below the surface.
When Mclaren personnel tested positive for Coronavirus ahead of the scheduled 2020 season opener, Seidl and CEO Zak Brown acted decisively to withdraw the team from the event while F1’s other stakeholders dithered. Seidl then stayed on in Australia until all the quarantined
“IN THE BARCELONA TEST WE COULD CLEARLY SEE WITH THE CAR THAT WE’D DEFINITELY MADE A STEP FORWARD”
ANDREAS SEIDL
personnel were able to leave.
But the pandemic also exposed shocking weaknesses in Mclaren’s finances. Other teams also faced shortfalls and had to furlough staff, but Mclaren isn’t just a racing team, it’s a multi-faceted group of automotive and technology companies. It has had to resort to drastic measures, including 1200 redundancies across the group and the sale of the Mclaren Technology Centre campus.
“It was obviously very difficult to deal with this crisis during a period where you couldn’t speak to your people face to face because lockdown was happening,” says Seidl. “Everything had to happen via remote communication and videos and so on, which is obviously not what you want when what you have to transfer is a very uncomfortable message. And in the end, we asked our people a lot. Sending them on furlough, asking for pay cuts and so on, was brutal. But in the end, it was the only way to make sure we came out of this crisis in a healthy way.”
Financially it was in the best interests of all the stakeholders to begin the season as soon as possible, but even then the pandemic continued to act as a disruptor. Better-resourced teams such as Mercedes had seen it coming and prepared car upgrades to be ready for build as soon as the factories came out of shutdown. Others were only just bringing employees out of furlough. That wrought a competitive order in which Mercedes enjoyed a dominant position with Red Bull second quickest despite a temperamental car.
This, along with the pegging-back of Ferrari’s engine, and Racing Point making unexpectedly heavy weather of exploiting its cloned 2019 Mercedes, set-up a tightly contested battle behind the leading two teams.
“We had a strong first half of the season,” says Seidl, “and straight away we had a highlight with the podium of Lando, which was a great reward for everyone who had to go through these difficult times. And it was good to see how the spirit was in the team, how we approached it together.
“In terms of performance, I would say in this first half of the season we never had the third fastest car. On average it was probably fourth or fifth fastest. But we maximised results and we benefitted from Racing Point, Renault and Ferrari leaving a lot of points. We had expected Ferrari and Racing Point to be out of reach, so this was very positive. We had a competitive car and two drivers that were always pulling it off.”
Mclaren’s race operations were generally sharp, barring a few pitstop issues early on, but it lost several prime points-scoring opportunities either through bad luck – such as Carlos Sainz’s tyre delamination in the British GP, while running
fourth – or the onset of reliability issues
(an engine-related exhaust issue meant Sainz didn’t start in Belgium). Since 2021 development will be limited by a token system, some of which Mclaren must spend adapting its car to a Mercedes powertrain, the team pushed aggressively through the 17-race 2020 season. Among the developments was a new front-end aerodynamic philosophy which it introduced on Sainz’s car for practice at Mugello and on Norris’s car at Sochi. Norris was tasked with racing the new nose in Russia even though both drivers had expressed reservations; since other developments further down the car were in the pipeline, and depended on the effectiveness of the new nose, it had to be evaluated in race conditions.
“We had to pull forward [the upgrade] because of the token system next year,” says Seidl. “And unfortunately it didn’t work straight away. It’s the first time in this year and a half since we made this reset to the team that we’ve experienced something like that, because we’ve always been riding a positive wave. It’s part of the journey we’re in, and it was actually good for me to see how the team reacted to that.
“We managed to stay calm, analyse what had happened and make our way out of it, making the right conclusions, and then managed to introduce the upgrade the way we expected it. If you look at the last races, we’ve had a competitive car. This has kept us in the battle.” Since arriving at Mclaren, Seidl has repeatedly returned to the theme of “focusing on the basics” and establishing clear management hierarchies.
His hiring by Brown was part of the process of dismantling the “matrix” management system which Mclaren had pursued – alone among F1 organisations – since the early 2000s. Inspired by the aerospace industry, it eliminates traditional divisions of responsibility. Adrian Newey has cited the system, and the levels of inertia it wrought by encouraging empire-building and
giving too many people too much influence, as one of his reasons for leaving in 2005.
Mclaren now operates a totally conventional racing team structure in which production, technical development and race operations have clear leaders. The last piece slotted into place last January when Andrea Stella was promoted to racing director, joining production director Piers Thynne and technical director Key in a senior management triumvirate which reports to Seidl, who reports to Brown.
“The most important thing last year [2019], and it was in the task I was given from Zak and the shareholders, was to clearly put on the table where I saw the deficits in the team,” says Seidl.
“One of the reasons I wanted to join Mclaren was because of the great history the team has, the great success it’s had in the past. But at the same time, we all had to realise that success in the past doesn’t give us any guarantee of it coming again.
“So that was task number one to put on the table: where we see the deficits in the team, and then define together, as a team, a clear path for how we want to get back to the front, how we want to reduce these deficits. And how we want to get in a position at some point in the future to be fighting at the front again. So, we put up a clear plan and then it was important for us that we work on this plan and make the steps that should come from executing it. And again, I’m very happy with the progress I’m seeing there so far.”
Eliminating the vices of the old management structure – and the built-in hubris attendant upon Mclaren’s status as one of F1’s most successful teams – has brought real change already. Other elements of Mclaren’s journey back to the front of the grid require a longer runway, such as the redevelopment of the 21-year-old windtunnel.
Since it was the first functioning element of the MTC, and the rest of the facility was built around it, the windtunnel is difficult and expensive to upgrade to moden standards.
Expediency has dictated Mclaren spend the past few years using the Toyota tunnel in Cologne, a practice Racing Point has recently abandoned in favour of an arrangement with Mercedes. The MTC windtunnel upgrade project is deemed so important that it is continuing despite Mclaren’s recent financial turbulence.
“We need to be realistic that it will take time,” adds Seidl. “We need to be patient also – ambitious, but patient in order to put everything in place. For example, the infrastructure projects that take a lot of time to finish, and then you get the benefit from this upgraded infrastructure.
“And in terms of the team, I’d say having gone through a period of having no success, it was important to kind of press the reset button, to build up this confidence that we can actually do it.
With the gap to the front, you need to be brave to go for new ways and trigger aggressive developments without fear of failure. That’s something we try to encourage – we don’t accept any blaming culture within the team. We have to accept that if we go aggressive, to make the steps we have to make, that stuff goes wrong from time to time. And I can see the benefits of that approach.”
Next season Daniel Ricciardo will replace Ferrari-bound Sainz. Though it was an enforced change – Sainz tied up his Ferrari deal, albeit with Zak Brown’s approval, during the lockdown hiatus – Ricciardo was undoubtedly the best available replacement. He will be at the very least like-for-like in terms of consistency, and he’s one of F1’s most committed overtakers, an apolitical team player, and a proven race winner.
That experience will be valuable in a team which, above all, is racier than it used to be. Over the past two seasons a mutual confidence has grown between the team and drivers, such that it feels able to put in place strategies which demand much of them. Norris’s Austria podium was built on a late call to change tyres which required him to do a lot of overtaking. The result, apart from another trophy, is that you can buy t-shirts emblazoned with “Scenario 7” – Mclaren’s code for turning the engine mode up and going for broke. A simple strategy call has launched a thousand social media memes…
Seidl speaks of how impressed he’s been by Ricciardo’s performance at Renault this year. Ricciardo’s reputation should cement Mclaren’s new-found confidence as it embarks on what will be an interim season before the new technical rules come in to force in 2022.
“We know the gap to the front in terms of performance is still huge, but we’ve closed the gap to Mercedes a bit in terms of laptime deficit,” says Seidl. “We have some areas, like race starts, race strategy, reliability, where we actually compete with the best. And these little highlights boost the self-confidence in the team without being arrogant – that it’s actually possible to do it.
“It’s now down to us to put together all the important ingredients to fight back in the future, which we’re getting in place over the next couple of years: the Mercedes power unit, the driver line-up, the new infrastructure. In the end it’s simply down to us, as a team, to work to make it happen.”
“WE HAVE SOME AREAS, LIKE RACE STARTS, RACE STRATEGY, RELIABILITY, WHERE WE ACTUALLY COMPETE WITH THE BEST”
ANDREAS SEIDL