Vodafone McLaren Mercedes 2013

[wesley123]

who says Vodafone will leave in the first place?

[Pup]

Vodafone.

“Having met and exceeded all the highly ambitious targets that Vodafone had set for its title partnership with McLaren, the company has now decided to focus on business priorities away from Formula One sponsorship.”

[Racer X]

who says Vodafone will leave in the first place?

Who's says? Uhm they said it not long ago.

[seventhsin]

Does anyone have more info on McLarens little 'rules' they write into their contracts?
For example the drivers can't keep their trophies or helmets, you must have a certain hairstyle and facial hair etc.

I know all the teams have PR staff that do this kind of stuff but I just hear alot about McLaren in particular

[PlatinumZealot]

who says Vodafone will leave in the first place?

Who's says? Uhm they said it not long ago.

Mclaren is a sinking ship now it seems.

[Racer X]

No McLaren is a great team with a great name they donminate Britain and are one of the Top names all over the world a Cell phone company' leaving wont define them.


Now im sure a new sponsor will come on board. Problem solved.

[Robbobnob]

Its not the sponsorship thats the problem, its the technical structure they have at Mclaren which is their Achilles heel.

With a different technical lead on alternating cars, there can be no real continuity in terms of development from one year to another, especially when there is such stability in the rules. Each technical lead will have their own philosophy on how to manipulate the air around the car to generate performance and subsequently developments such as the front wing and break ducts will have a significant effect on how that is done, these are improved by a process of iteration, continuously tweaking the topology of the wings surfaces to direct the flow around the side-pod and into the coke bottle.
As soon as the technical lead changes and the philosophy on how to utilise the coke bottle and exhaust blown diffuser changes, all the fine iteration work which was done on the front of the previous car is lost and the performance of the car takes a huge hit.

Teams with a stable technical structure, like Red Bull for example, have a lead engineer that decides whether a philosophy will work on the car or not, and has the ability to carry through developments to the next years car and even improving them.

That being said in times of wholesale changes to the techical Regulations, sometimes it is beneficial to have two technical teams, but that hasnt been the case for the last two years.

[Pup]

According to this documentary, the racing team isn't even working out of Paragon anymore, and have taken up space I guess in Woking somewhere. We can only guess why, but it can't be good. They're also running full scale wind tunnel test, which I don't think is allowed, so it shows how desperate they are to get this year's car fixed.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO4o302P0js[/youtube]

[Richard]

As soon as the technical lead changes and the philosophy on how to utilise the coke bottle and exhaust blown diffuser changes, all the fine iteration work which was done on the front of the previous car is lost and the performance of the car takes a huge hit.

I don't know if it is due to the team structure, but they do seem to try a gimmick every year in recent years. That must disrupt evolutionary development. While the top teams progressively evolve their cars, McLaren routinely declare there is little scope for evolution and start afresh.

2008 - WDC
2009 - oh oh
2010 - F duct
2011 - U pods
2012 - Coanda
2013 - Pull rod front

It is interesting that 2012 was their best car for a while, but they binned that for a fresh approach in 2013. I can't think of any other team that has changed design philosophy so much. If only Newey had binned his design philosophy each time he had a fast car, then we'd have a more open championship!

The fact that McLaren consistently run near the front can be read two ways:

- There is no difference between being disruptive vs consistent, ergo design has little impact on performance and budget is more important.

Or

- Their relatively high performance is despite constant changes, just imagine how good they'd be if they had a consistent approach.

It appears one advantage of making it up as they go along is that they are great at mid season development. Their ability to catch up is second to none, but it'd be better if they started at the front in the first place!

[Pup]

I don't know if it is due to the team structure, but they do seem to try a gimmick every year in recent years. That must disrupt evolutionary development. While the top teams progressively evolve their cars, McLaren routinely declare there is little scope for evolution and start afresh.

2008 - WDC
2009 - oh oh
2010 - F duct
2011 - U pods
2012 - Coanda
2013 - Pull rod front

Of course, the F-duct and Coanda Exhausts were immediately copied up and down the grid. As was the J-damper after that idea was stolen - I mean to say, was discovered inadvertently in a way that was nothing whatsoever like the Stepney thing.

One could argue that McLaren's worst problems have been when they've opted to develop their prior cars as opposed to change. In '09, they missed the boat on both the double diffuser and the front wing. In '11, they missed the boat on the exhaust blown diffuser (arguable, since they did have two designs, both of which worked absolute wonders on paper). In '12, they missed the boat on the higher front nose.

In my mind, McLaren's woes seem to be that they are often too slow to understand/copy what the other teams have done, while the other teams have readily copied/improved upon McLaren's innovations.

I think they suffer a bit from Not Invented Here Syndrome; and contrary to the common wisdom on McLaren, I think they are often painfully slow at adapting and developing their designs. Particularly given their resources.

My gut feeling is that they only tend to introduce designs when they think they have the perfect solution, which are often too far developed by the time they hit the track. That is, they take the designs too far before proving them on the car, so when they don't work, it's a nightmare for them to reconstruct why. Of course, if they do work, then they're golden.

[Robbobnob]

Further adding to what i was saying about a lack in technical structure:

I am by no means questioning the ability of the engineering staff at McLaren, as we know they are one of the most innovative in the field with the class leading technology.

Perhaps without a strong technical lead they often get preoccupied with a concept, such as the octopus exhaust etc which leads them to make design decisions about optimizing the performance of each concept rather than optimising the performance of the car as a whole. This is only speculation and i dont have any thorough evidence to support my theory.

Though one thing i am fairly certain of is that the McLaren ride characteristics of the car have been setup to be very stiff in the front of the car for the past few years, made obvious by the tendency of Lewis and Jensen to lock a brake into the corner. This could be due to a number of things, lack of sufficient chassis stiffness, a design philosophy for having the front of the car stiffer in roll to allow the rear to be more compliant and therefore have better traction on corner exit. Perhaps raising the height of the chassis meant they were unable to achieve the previous ride characteristics?
Does any body know if the Mclaren is still prone to locking the inside tyre upon corner entry?

[tony77g]

McLaren aero test today in Spain?
It's True?
http://www.f1sport.it/2013/05/06/f1-il- ... a-mclaren/

[stefan_]

McLaren aero test today in Spain?
It's True?
http://www.f1sport.it/2013/05/06/f1-il- ... a-mclaren/

[Pup]

Following up on my previous post...

My gut feeling is that they only tend to introduce designs when they think they have the perfect solution, which are often too far developed by the time they hit the track. That is, they take the designs too far before proving them on the car, so when they don't work, it's a nightmare for them to reconstruct why. Of course, if they do work, then they're golden.

I think McLaren agrees...

The issues that we have are - I'm speculating - broadly similar to the issues that Ferrari found themselves with last year, which is that you think you've done enough over the winter but you take your car out of the modelling and simulation environment and run it on the circuit and have one of those moments where you think 'That was definitely not to plan'.

It's hard work digging yourself out of that because over a period of time you've optimised a number of things around the car on a false premise. Step one is finding that false premise and how it crept in, step two is then undoing all the things you've subsequently tuned and optimised around the car. So you can never just pull out the one missing part and put in a new one, that's not the way these things work. We'll see ourselves gradually pull ourselves back from this one.

Full story:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/formula-one/22450538

[Pierce89]

Mclaren has "correlation issues"
http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/107261
Now let's see if they fight back like Ferrari did.