aran.vtec wrote: ↑12 Jul 2022, 09:42
Zak brown might be good financially for the Team but don't think he's doing the best as race results are concerned.
Blaming Brown for race results seems unreasonable, Key and Seidl are responsible for that, though Brown is responsible for selecting them. Seidl is a proven winning team principal in LMP racing, so I doubt Seidl is the problem. If Key isn't up to it, then Key isn't up to it, but Key was highly rated beforehand.
the EDGE wrote: ↑12 Jul 2022, 10:11
Well I doubt it’s a coincidence that the top 3 teams over the last decade were
the 3 teams spending twice as much as McLaren, and those teams remain the top 3 this year
The decision of McLaren not to sell to Mercedes (and indeed to spend money
buying out Mercedes) goes way back.
Could ex-McLaren have won titles as a well-funded Mercedes GP and could their sportscars have been funded by Mercedes and sold as McLaren-Mercedes (or just Mercedes) instead of McLarens?
IMO it is clear that not selling the race team to Mercedes and trying to self-fund the road cars instead of having Mercedes fund them and sell them as Mercedes road cars, is the root of most of McLaren's financial problems. Maybe this approach of retaining independence will pay off down the line (noting however that Ferrari needed(?) to be with FIAT for a while, rather than fully independent), who knows?
basti313 wrote: ↑12 Jul 2022, 10:58
The works teams have the edge on cooling and chassis layout. McLaren was screwed by this again and I can not believe how people here still claim that being a customer in the Hybrid F1 is not killing any perspective of a championship.
Brown certainly made the decision to abandon the works Honda engines, and that seemed to work out best for all three of Honda, Red Bull and McLaren.
Recently, it sounds like Audi were interested buying in and running as McLaren-Audi or just Audi (ex-McLaren) as their works team, but McLaren (for some reason) don't want to do that, so Sauber is going to profit from that and become the Audi works team instead?
In this instance of rejecting works engines from elsewhere, should McLaren be pursuing their own power unit division and their own McLaren works engines for 2026?
Red Bull are already starting on such a project so McLaren would want to get a move along if they wish to pursue a similar project.
