McLaren bins radical exhaust system
McLaren's team principal Martin Whitmarsh has today revealed that his team have been working on a simpler exhaust system and new floor to be introduced at the upcoming Australian GP. Whitmarsh said the radical system tested during the winter proved to be disappointing.
"I'm not satisfied with where the car was on reliability or performance in the test," he said. "We have made some fairly dramatic changes, and those changes we will see in Australia. There's some risk in that, but I think it was the right thing to do and we're hopeful that that risk comes off and the car is a lot more competitive in Australia."
Whitmarsh rued the troubled winter tests which did not bring the hoped for performance while reliability was also an issue. The team soon realised that complexity of the system wasn't bringing what it should, and instead caused the team headaches trying to solve the problems. The newer design will be far simpler, and hopefully also reduce reliability problems.
"I'd say it is a simpler design than we've had before," he said. "I think the exhaust systems have become quite extreme on quite a lot of the cars. I think we in particular had very extreme solutions.
"But I think that they were not delivering, in my opinion, sufficient benefits for their complexity.
"I believe that the car isn't fundamentally a bad car. I believe that we need to unlock the exhaust-blowing potential.
"We had some very creative ideas, some of which could have worked spectacularly well. But if they were to work spectacularly well then they had to be sufficiently durable to be raceable, and frankly some of our solutions weren't, and that's why I think we had to go back on it. But I think in doing so we found some interesting performance."
Introducing such a major change at a race weekend is quite a risk and not what a team would hope for, but given that McLaren expects to gain a full second from it, they are taking the risk to test it for the first time next Friday during free practice.
