Grapevine: Starship McLaren Sets the Paddock Pace

Spring is in the air, Formula One is back in Europe and the opulent team motorhomes are out in the paddock again.

But motorhome is not a word that McLaren like to use these days.

For them, the traditional arrangement is about as old-fashioned as a car with ground-effect skirts and slick tyres. The thing to have nowadays is a shiny new 'Team Communications Centre.'

The Mercedes-powered team's latest piece of mobile real estate (price confidential but estimated at around $8 million) was the talking point of the paddock after it made a first appearance at Imola last weekend.

Dubbed the 'Gaumont' by some older members of the Grand Prix fraternity, fondly recalling their picture palace days, it immediately grabbed the attention with spotlights around the entrance and cinema poster-style arrangement of drivers' photographs overhead.

For McLaren's David Coulthard, the Scot waiting to be beamed up into title contention after four races spent inhaling exhaust gases from the red planet Ferrari, it was a silver 'Starship Enterprise'.

Whatever else came to mind, it was certainly light years away from the days when a cup of tea served from a bus with an awning represented the height of corporate hospitality.

Simply the Best

The new centre packs into six trucks, takes two-and-a-half days to set up and occupies as much space as three conventional motorhomes side by side.

It has taken more than two years in the planning, conceived at a time when Finland's Mika Hakkinen was champion and McLaren ruled the roost, and the general public - on the wrong side of the paddock fence - will never get near it.

"We have recognised that Formula One hospitality has changed dramatically over recent years and have a simple desire to be the best at everything," said team boss Ron Dennis.

"Before anyone suggests that perhaps we are not focused on the right area, let me say also that not one person involved in the project, except me, is involved with making our cars go faster."

Given the intensely competitive nature of Formula One, a sport where those with money are not shy about showing off, it can only be a matter of time before 'Team Communication Centres' start popping up all over the place.

When they do, the gulf between the haves and have nots - already evident on the track - will become only more glaring.

Teams like McLaren and Ferrari are carefully run businesses, world beaters with big backing and the resources to stand out from the rest. But others are in a very different position and Imola provided a reminder of this too.

"Several of the teams have not got enough money," said International Automobile Federation (FIA) president Max Mosley, who made his first race appearance of the season.

"Now we can sit there and have some idealised view of things and say, well, it's nice to let everybody do what they want, spend as much money as they wish," he said, asked about the FIA's recent announcement of engine changes to cut costs.

"But when we start losing two, three or four teams off the back of the grid, suddenly the whole of Formula One is under threat. The problem is that it's all very well for the top teams to say, well if you save me $20-30 million a year, I will simply spend it on something else.

"We are not concerned with them. We are concerned with the people who are missing $20 or 30 million out of their budget and have got absolutely no way of filling the hole."