Originally Posted by BinaryDad:
“You could say the same for Williams, though. They wouldn't have seen the PU until quite late (I think the split turbo was a surprise for all the customers) but still managed to do a bang-up job on packaging.
I suspect that the design team at McLaren just didn't "get" how crucial that was going to be. After all, all Merc provided was the PU - the radiators, intercooler etc. were left to the teams to provide. Maybe they, in a moment of arrogance, thought that was the best that could be done and none of the Merc teams could really beat their solution.”
I think deadmancarl was suggesting that Merc' might deliberately withheld the 2014 engine for as long as possible to shaft McLaren because they were parting company.
Can't really see that myself.
I mean, obviously Merc' want the factory team to beat the customer teams but, beyond that, surely it's in their interests for EVERY Merc' powered team to do as well as possible?
I would have thought Merc' would just assume that their ability to develop the car in parallel with the engine would give them their advantage over the customers so, that being the case, they'd hand the engine over to ALL their customers at the same time to give them all the best possible chance of building a decent car.
Not really sure what to make of McLaren over the last few years.
Okay, so they "wasted" a couple of years dicking around with a pullrod front suspension (have they finally given up on that now?) after even Ferrari gave up on it but, beyond that, it doesn't seem like they're doing anything that's horribly
wrong.
It just seems like they're not doing enough that's spectacularly
right.
Even the pullrod front suspension probably
is a fundamentally good idea. It's just that nobody seems to have got a handle on how to make it work properly yet.
That's the sort of challenge where McLaren really
should excel but, recently, it just doesn't seem like they've got the expertise to pull anything truly revolutionary out of the bag.
Maybe that's what happens when you divert too much of your attention to building road-going poseur-mobiles?
They should've called the "P1" the "P7" if they really wanted it to reflect their F1 abilities.