‘McLaren Winter Woes Worst in 20 Years’ at LinesMaker

‘McLaren win­ter woes worst in 20 years’

McLaren tech­ni­cal direc­tor Paddy Lowe has described the team’s win­ter prob­lems as the “most chal­leng­ing” in 20 years.

The Woking-based team endured a night­mare pre-season as their rad­i­cal MP4-26 was not only off the pace of the Red Bulls and Fer­raris, but Lewis Hamil­ton and Jen­son But­ton also headed into the first race of the year near to bot­tom of the mileage chart as the car strug­gled to com­plete a test day with­out break­ing down.

“The win­ter tests in Feb­ru­ary and early March were prob­a­bly some of our most chal­leng­ing expe­ri­ences in terms of run­ning reli­a­bil­ity that I can remem­ber in 20 years,” Lowe told the offi­cial McLaren website.

“It was an exhaust­ing month for every­one at Wok­ing and Brixworth.

“There weren’t actu­ally that many issues, but we kept expe­ri­enc­ing a vari­ety of fail­ures with our new exhaust sys­tem. We’d come into the cir­cuit each morn­ing think­ing we’d fixed the prob­lems of the pre­vi­ous day, only to be met with a fresh series of tri­als the next day!

“Those days were very dif­fi­cult for the team.”

McLaren though man­aged to turn things around before the first race in Aus­tralia after opt­ing to re-design their exhaust pack­age. It paid imme­di­ate div­i­dends as they picked up two podi­ums in the open­ing two races.

“Things came together just in time – and that was down to a com­bi­na­tion of fac­tors: we were lucky, I have to admit, but it was much more than luck,” Lowe added.

“You have to fac­tor in the skill of the team to work together in a very short period of time to push in a com­pletely dif­fer­ent direc­tion; to under­stand all the dif­fer­ent issues – the reli­a­bil­ity, the per­for­mance – the skills of the team, all the tools they’ve cre­ated over the years; they all came through to our profit.”

Their remark­able change in for­tune was com­pleted at the Chi­nese Grand Prix when Hamil­ton won despite suf­fer­ing a fuel just before the race. The McLaren mechan­ics were still work­ing on his car just moments before the race.

“Look at how we all worked in China to get Lewis’s car out of the garage and onto the grid with 30 sec­onds to go. That was also the result of incred­i­ble team­work: 20 guys, all on the radio, work­ing very hard and very rapidly around the car,” Lowe said.

“In those instances, there’s not a big dis­cus­sion about who’s going to do what; there are very few instruc­tions, every­body moves seam­lessly, they know what they’ve got to do.

“When you’re in a cri­sis, peo­ple know what they’re good at and how they can con­tribute. They’re also respect­ful about what oth­ers can do. We saw that on a macro level before Aus­tralia sev­eral weeks ago and on a micro level in China on Sunday.

“For Aus­tralia, we had 10 days. In China, just six min­utes. In both instances, the team brought all their resources to the objec­tive and rose mag­nif­i­cently to the occasion.

“It still makes me emo­tional when I think about it.”

 

TOP SPORTS BETTING SPECIALS

 

MORE SPORTS BETTING NEWS