Helping McLaren’s greats go faster for 40 years

Motorsport is full of unsung heroes – the mechanics, engineers and other personnel who help make everything possible but don’t grab the limelight in the way that drivers, team bosses and (sometimes) designers do. Indy Lall is one such person, a quiet and humble man who has contributed to many McLaren successes over four decades in orange (and silver, and white-and-red).

Lall won his first world championship grand prix as chief mechanic on John Watson’s car in the 1981 British GP, helped Alain Prost to two drivers’ titles and then set up McLaren’s ground-breaking test team that included working with Ayrton Senna, Mika Hakkinen, David Coulthard, Kimi Raikkonen, Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso and many more. The cliché that he’s forgotten more than many of us will ever know seems particularly apt for Lall, who until recently was the manager of McLaren’s burgeoning Heritage arm.

Born in Kenya, Lall’s interest came early. His father had a couple of heavy goods vehicle garages and Indy, the youngest of four brothers, often tinkered there.

“There was a local race track that we used to frequent and it stayed with us until we came to the UK,” recalls Lall. “My oldest brother Kim lived around Bedfordshire so Silverstone was very close to us; we went to many races and he wanted to race. He saved up and saved up, which for me – watching him save and not spend any money – was quite painful, and he eventually bought a Royale RP21. That’s where we first met Rory Byrne, who subsequently became a good friend.”

Lall acted as mechanic for his brother, which proved an interesting experience: “I got frustrated because, obviously him not wanting to push to the limit to have a crash because he wouldn’t be able to repair it, was painful. He was actually very good, but when your mind takes over your concerns… It was at that point that I thought I’d rather be on the other side, so at least I don’t have those worries.”

Lall wrote to F1 teams looking for work. Not many replied but 1964 world champion John Surtees did. “He said, ‘Come and see me and I can explain things to you’,” says Lall. “I went to meet him at Edenbridge and what a lovely man – he became such a good friend as our paths crossed over the years. He gave me so much time and guidance – ‘You’ve got to start from the bottom’ – and it was absolutely the right thing, so I started reaching out to local teams and one of them was Mallock.”

Under Arthur Mallock (“what a brilliant man, so clever”), the small firm was one of the leading constructors in British motorsport. Lall realised there was nobody doing fabrication so put himself through night school, adding to his engineering and welding knowledge, and carried out fabrication work for Mallock. “I learned a great deal there – it was a tiny company and yet their car sales were phenomenal,” he adds. “We were building cars constantly.”

Then a Scottish customer wanted Richard Mallock to race his new car, and Lall went with him to Ingliston. Mallock wasn’t happy with the brakes and it was “really full on” but Mallock won the race and Lall decided he really enjoyed being at the event: “That was the start of ‘I want to go racing’.”

Lall worked with Cheever during the 1978 F2 campaign

Photo by: LAT Images via Getty Images

After looking through Autosport and Motoring News for jobs, Lall applied to be an F3 mechanic for Project Four, run by Ron Dennis. But things didn’t start smoothly when he went for the interview.

“The time of the meeting arrived and went, and no Ron,” says Lall. “Eventually he turned up and I wasn’t terribly happy, but he was OK. Straight away, he said, ‘I’ve got good news and bad news, which one do you want first?’”

The bad news was that the job had gone and Lall was “furious” but the good news was “I’ve got a job for you on the F2 team”. It was as a gofer, which Lall wasn’t keen on, but Dennis then explained everything Surtees had said so Lall decided he had nothing to lose: “Ron said ‘Trust me’ and I trusted him.”

Lall did a year with Eddie Cheever and Ingo Hoffmann in 1978, with Cheever eventually finishing fourth in the team’s March-BMW. Having built up a new team truck with fellow future McLaren man Neil Trundle, Lall quickly elevated himself with his eye for detail and organisation.

"It was a tough initiation with the established McLaren people, quite intimidating. Teddy was a really, really nice guy and he must have been under a lot of pressure. It was stagnant" Indy Lall

“The truck was state-of-the-art – and a statement – and I declared it mine: ‘If you want something, come and see me’,” he states. “I knew I wanted to do more than just gofering.”

Once he’d done his basic chores, Lall started working on the cars and he became lead mechanic for Chico Serra in F3 in 1979. He then worked with Serra and Andrea de Cesaris in F2 in 1980, as well as being involved with the BMW M1 Procar series – “What superb cars they were and it’s a shame that sort of stuff doesn’t happen nowadays in F1. You could see it was all building. Ron’s plans were already set with the Marlboro money.”

Those plans were a merger with the struggling McLaren F1 team. Under Teddy Mayer, the former title-winning squad had slumped to ninth in the 1980 constructors’ standings and hadn’t won a GP for three years.

“I was initially excited and then I thought, ‘I’m not ready for this!’,” remembers Lall. “I said to Ron that I didn’t think I was ready for F1 and he said, ‘We’re in it together – it’s just a bigger car and we’re going to learn together’. It was a tough initiation with the established McLaren people, quite intimidating. Teddy was a really, really nice guy and he must have been under a lot of pressure. It was stagnant. While I was in awe of everything that I saw there, it was very ancient. While Project Four was tiny, it was way ahead in how it was maintained. That’s how you work – if you’re environment is either clean or not, that’s how your outcome is going to be.”

Assisting the likes of designer Barnard, driver Watson and team boss Dennis, Lall was one of the key members in the background at the new-look McLaren

Photo by: LAT Images via Getty Images

They initially went racing with what they had – the M29s being “bloody awful things” – but Dennis already had John Barnard working on the MP4/1. The first chassis, which brought the carbon fibre monocoque to F1, arrived for round three in Argentina for Watson.

“We hadn’t seen anything like it,” says Lall, who was number one mechanic on Wattie’s car that season. “I knew what Ron wanted and the momentum was there. There was so much innovation on that car so there were a lot of failures by pushing boundaries. John Barnard isn’t credited enough because he pioneered so much. The materials we have now just didn’t exist then.”

At the same time, the team had clean uniform every day and everything was in its place. Lall’s approach mirrored Dennis’s.

It took a little while for the bugs to be ironed out but the progress was there. A second car for de Cesaris arrived for Monaco, while Watson was third in Spain (as part of the famous train behind Gilles Villeneuve’s Ferrari) and second in France. Then came the Silverstone victory, Watson avoiding early chaos triggered by Villeneuve and then overcoming Rene Arnoux’s Renault in the closing stages. “It was just incredible, to get a grand prix win,” says Lall. “The enormity of it.”

McLaren was back. The following season, when Niki Lauda came out of retirement to join Watson, was even better. McLaren took four wins, jumping from sixth to second in the standings, while Watson finished just five points behind champion Keke Rosberg.

But it’s Watson’s victory at Zolder, the day after Villeneuve’s fatal crash in qualifying, that Lall remembers: “The cars behind the accident all stopped and John was one of them. There was no information and you fear the worst. Eventually we heard cars fire up and thankfully we saw John coming in. He pulled up and he was white as a sheet and he just said, ‘Gilles is dead’. Then the next day he went and won – it beggars belief how they can do this. It’s incredible.”

Although Watson famously led a McLaren 1-2 at Long Beach after starting 22nd, McLaren and its Cosworth DFVs struggled against the turbo hordes in 1983. But, once again, Dennis had a plan in the shape of TAG-Porsche power for Barnard’s brilliant MP4/2. And then Renault sacked Prost, allowing Dennis to put together McLaren’s first ‘superteam’.

“John is such a lovely man, but that’s exactly it – he just got pushed out the way and lost his drive,” says Lall, who became Prost’s number one mechanic. “But then you’ve got Alain Prost waiting in the wings, you’ve got to go for it. The Porsche team were superb, clever guys, set the standard. That was a fantastic year. The only accident I can remember was in warm-up at the Nurburgring. Something wasn’t quite right on the car and Alain slid off. One of the safety cars was poking out where it shouldn’t have been and he hit it. The engine needed changing as well so it was completely manic.”

Lall admits he felt the pain of Prost missing out on the 1984 title by half a point

Photo by: Ercole Colombo / Studio Colombo / Getty Images

It didn’t stop Prost winning the race by over 20 seconds, with Lauda fourth, setting up the Estoril showdown with just 3.5 points between them. Prost won – making the 1984 score seven-five in his favour – but Lauda took the crown. “That was a good year, but losing by half a point was very hard to take,” admits Lall.

Personal issues meant that Lall briefly left McLaren to work for Kraco Racing in Indycar, running Michael Andretti and Kevin Cogan. It was not a happy time, but Dennis made sure he kept tabs on Lall, helped by Alan Jenkins at Penske.

Following a practice crash for Cogan at Indianapolis, Lall got an unexpected visitor: “I was rummaging through all the broken bits and then I saw these shiny loafers. I knew exactly who it was. I looked up and it was Ron, with this grin on his face. He said, ‘Enjoying yourself?!’ And I said, ‘No Ron, I’m not’.”

It wasn’t long before Lall had left Kraco and rejoined McLaren, in June 1985. “I was relieved that he’d got in touch and made the effort to come out,” says Lall, who now had to find a role for himself. “No one was really looking after the engines – obviously we had Porsche who supported us at the races with Bosch – but from a McLaren base point of view, looking after mileages on the engines, turbos, wastegates, exhausts, clutches – that wasn’t being done. I saw that and it was hard to slot in somewhere because everyone’s established mid-season so that was a good point to make my own.”

"We’ve always tried to have two strong drivers and you’ve got to be fair to them. Niki was so mature, so fair. Through the year Alain was in determined mood, but they worked together so well" Indy Lall

Lall gained an insight into the challenges of being fair to two frontrunning drivers, even as Prost gained the momentum that would take him to the 1985 title. Lall regularly went between races and Porsche’s Weissach base. “We very much dictated what was being run and when, unlike nowadays,” he says. “If there were upgrades or a particularly stronger engine on the dyno, Porsche would notify us, which in some instances made it tricker; where do you place it?”

He also recalls a new floor and new front wing on two different occasions and they weren’t raced because they couldn’t be offered to both drivers: “We’ve always tried to have two strong drivers and you’ve got to be fair to them. Niki was so mature, so fair. Through the year Alain was in determined mood, but they worked together so well. Alain had had quite a torrid time at Renault, coming so close and not winning, he was quite polished by then. And the team approach was a lot more balanced, calmer, more methodical – both drivers got the same equipment.”

McLaren duly secured its second consecutive title double in 1985 and over the winter Lall moved back across to being number one on Prost’s car again. It meant he was in the thick of things as Prost and team combined brilliantly to steal the drivers’ title from under the noses of Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet despite the MP4/2C being outpaced by the Williams-Honda FW11.

“The team was so established there wasn’t a lot of movement and as a crew we were experienced, strong,” says Lall. “Much like a driver once he’s gained experience he becomes more established, it’s the same with crew. You look at every detail and it’s quite an easy working environment then.

The McLaren crew celebrate Prost's 1985 title

Photo by: Sutton Images

“There was never a strong character, it all gelled, we just wanted the same thing. The team itself was very introvert, not loud, it’s quite bizarre. Ron ran everything, rightly very highly regarded – he was an introvert, shy as anything. But Ron would sometimes throw a party and he’d be loose. His mantra was let’s do the talking on track and set standards. Ron never skimped on anything in terms of if we needed something to do a better job. Having that knowledge, you could think far; how can I make this better. Looking back at photographs on when we first started and the equipment was so archaic. And slowly it went up.”

Another major part of McLaren’s raising of the F1 game came in 1987. Off the back of securing a Honda engine deal – and Senna – for the following year, Dennis wanted a bigger, better bespoke test team and he regarded Lall as the man for the job.

“I was wanting to settle down and have a family, around the middle of 1987,” recounts Lall. “I gave him plenty of notice and he didn’t say much at the time. I needed to confirm that – I wanted a workshop position so I wasn’t travelling so much. From mid-season onwards he was working on trying to pull Honda over. Towards the end of the season I went to see him again and said I’d like a workshop position and Ron volunteered the news, before it went public: ‘Well that’s a shame because I’ve got a good position for you’, knowing I’d bite on it and ask him what is it. Eventually he said, ‘We’re going to be a works Honda team and it’s going to be bigger and better than anything ever. We’ll have our own test team and that’s what I want you to do, head up a test team.’

“His vision was that he was going to push boundaries, to have an established F1 team with its race team, all its own equipment, crew engineers, drivers etc anywhere in the world racing, and at the same time have an established test team with its own crews and engineers. Two cars in Europe testing, one car in Japan at the same time. It was too big a challenge to bypass! I knew money wasn’t going to be a problem because he was so determined he was going to make it happen. We had absolutely nothing, so we sourced trucks, personnel, equipment. It was a massive challenge and one of the most enjoyable times. Such hard work but you knew where you were heading – no one was going to have this.”

Lall “was keen to have two experienced guys per car” initially and soon formed relationships with top teams in the junior single-seater categories, including Carlin, Fortec and Double R to get good talent. Over time the programme “automatically drew good people to us”, which gave other benefits over the ‘standard’ target, which was “to try and break things, improve the car, improve the engine, everything”.

“The race team could be somewhere in the world, we would be somewhere in Europe, and our third car would be running in Suzuka,” he continues. “To finally reach that level, when you knew it was all happening in sync, was very satisfying, fulfilling.”

Once up and running, Lall essentially remained the manager of the test team, so his plans to settle down and stop travelling had to wait. “It was so intense, three to four days per week of testing, going from circuit to circuit,” says Lall. “You can’t be an authoritarian, everyone was doing their best and the results are there proving it, so it was a case of leading by example and being with them. It was tough not only for the team itself but also the drivers. It was serious, serious mileage. When Pedro de la Rosa first came to us he was completely knackered. He could not believe what was expected of him. You’ve got to be able to sustain what’s being thrown at you, mentally to digest the information, but physically also.”

There were long periods away from home, sometimes for six weeks at a time, but the test team provided a good training ground for personnel, including drivers. “You need a good, strong test driver that still has ambition to go racing,” reckons Lall. “Pedro was very intelligent, very good technically, Alex Wurz was very good, very accomplished. Allan McNish, Ricardo Zonta – they are all really, really good drivers.”

Having overseen the McLaren test team, Lall saw up close and personal some of the F1 greats

Photo by: JEP

Nevertheless, top drivers would sometimes show their class. “We were in Jerez with Emanuele Pirro,” says Lall. “He did the first two days and then Alain took over. In the morning Alain gets in the car to do an install lap. Pirro had done two days and been quickest on both, hundreds of kilometres covered. Alain came in and says, ‘Everything is OK but something’s not quite right on the back. I can’t explain it, but it doesn’t feel right.’ We had a look around and I said, ‘It all looks OK’ and he says, ‘OK, it’s probably just me, I’ll go and do a run’.

“Out he goes and he comes straight back in: ‘Something’s definitely not quite right’. So we took the wheels and tyres off and had a really good push and a prod. There was a toe link and on the outboard end it needed a sleeve to the right size and that sleeve was missing. Even though the bolt had been torqued, so you can’t move it by your hand, when the grip of the tyre loaded up it would just move by a millimetre and he felt that. Honestly, it’s insane these sorts of moments happen and you’ve got to stop and think, ‘I’m in the presence of supergods’, so sensitive, so good.”

It would be remiss not to take the opportunity to get Lall’s take on some of the drivers he has worked so closely with.

“I’ve always been very fond of Alain,” he says as we start with Prost. “A person’s personality has always been important to me and even now he’s softly spoken – and brilliant in a car. He could extract the best out of it. I liked him very much, I like him now.

"I’m a bit sad about how little credit David gets. He was so quick on his day – you don’t win 13 GPs by luck up against Mika and Michael Schumacher" Indy Lall

“I first met Senna when he was doing world karting and you knew right then how good this youngster was going to be. I followed his career and when he eventually came to us he was such a homegrown lad. Super-sensitive. His family was the biggest thing for him and he believed in spirituality – and you’ve got to respect that. From arriving at the circuit, he’d greet everyone and be one of the lads and then gradually it would start ramping up. The great thing about him was that he’d spend quite a bit of time at the circuit at the end of the day, until he was absolutely clear on how the day’s gone and the preparation for the next day. He spent good time with the mechanics and I think that was his way of giving something back, knowing how hard they were working.”

After a drought in the immediate post-Senna era, McLaren picked up in the second half of the 1990s with Mercedes power and West sponsorship. Hakkinen took a title double in 1998-99, though Lall is also keen to acknowledge Coulthard’s contribution.

“That was quite a fun period,” he says. “I’m a bit sad about how little credit David gets. He was so quick on his day – you don’t win 13 GPs by luck up against Mika and Michael Schumacher. David was very committed.

“I got very close to Mika. We had a lot of failures one year in testing and it near-on broke him. I gravitated towards him and being more compassionate, realising it could be make or break in terms of confidence. We did lots of things together away from the circuit to build up the relationship and in those moments you can talk more openly. Phenomenal natural ability in Mika.”

Lall grew close to Hakkinen while he felt Raikkonen was a missed opportunity at McLaren

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Despite the success, McLaren was still seen as a slightly aloof team, a feeling very different to the one inside it. “We were known as quite cold, but that was so far from the truth,” argues Lall. “You just concentrated on what you were doing and getting on with it. When Olivier Panis and later Pedro de la Rosa joined us, they both said the same thing: everyone from the outside thinks we’re unapproachable and miserable but that’s so far from true. Focus was the key thing behind it – it’s a serious game.”

Like many, Lall regards Raikkonen’s time at McLaren as a missed opportunity: “He’s one that got away. He’s one we should have won championships with, but he had failures. Again, such natural ability, he was flushed with it. Intelligent. He takes it all in and then declutters, focusing on just what he needs to. When Kimi first came to us, with DC being established and knowing the direction of where the car needed to be, Kimi struggled quite a bit. Between him and the engineers they established that he needed a different front end altogether, so there was a new suspension drawn up for Kimi, which made the T-car tricky. But it was like a light switch, he was completely transformed.

“As a team it dilutes, because you are going in two different directions, not just logistically in terms of parts, but in terms of developing the car. Which us why I think if you can have two fairly similar drivers you are heading the in the right direction development-wise.”

Thanks to his insights through testing, Lall was sometimes involved in driver selection. That was particularly true in 2006 when McLaren had Ferrari-bound Raikkonen and Juan Pablo Montoya in the race seats, Hamilton knocking on the door as he put together a successful GP2 challenge and Alonso ready to come over from Renault as a world champion.

“Juan Pablo was never happy being here in the UK,” reckons Lall. “I really liked him because he was a really grounded individual, but he can’t be away from family. “Lewis had a fairly lengthy career under the McLaren banner anyway and it was decided to give him a run in the car. The first time was at Elvington in Yorkshire to do some aero mapping work. It’s fairly simple stuff but you’ve got to do everything right and he didn’t put a foot wrong.

“Then we went to Valencia and we had a very strict plan of what we wanted to get through. Towards the end of his day he went off at Turn 1 and damaged the car, and he was absolutely mortified, to the point of we spent quite a long time afterwards, even after he’d gone to the hotel, on the phone with Lewis wanting to get back in the car.”

Each night Lall would report back to Dennis to give him first-hand information, good and bad, which included Montoya not always doing the laps required by the tyre supplier.

“A decision needed to be made on race drivers for the following year and Ron said, ‘What would you do?’ and I said, ‘I would give this kid a go’. He’d been racing since he was eight years of age, surrounded by good people within the McLaren umbrella and technically there was nothing missing. Yes he had a lot to learn but in terms of his feedback he was spot on. He knew what he wanted. He was fast, young, so why wouldn’t you?”

Lall backed Hamilton's McLaren promotion despite his age and lack of experience

Photo by: Gareth Bumstead / Motorsport Images

That, of course, set up the fractious relationship between Hamilton and Alonso in 2007. Although not a fan of the political shenanigans that went on, Lall respects the Spaniard’s abilities in the cockpit.

“He is a brilliant driver – how he does it, I don’t know,” says Lall. “He’s not the smoothest. Politics shouldn’t be part of top-level sport on the ground. You’ve got to be completely focused. If you allow politics in your head when you should be performing, you’re not going to perform. The fact is there was no favouritism.

“Pre-season, yes Lewis did an amazing job, but you’re still going into your first season of F1 against a two-time champion. Who do the odds favour? That was a tough year. The worst was testing in Spain, especially Barcelona – they were cruel to Lewis.”

Lall’s testing role also meant that he worked with many other up-and-coming drivers, both within McLaren’s own programme and through the McLaren Autosport BRDC Award, which began in 1989 and rewarded winners with an F1 test.

"I worked hard to get to know the Honda guys and they needed to be convinced I was on their side. Honda didn’t know how our team was structured and they thought I was there to watch them so I felt like an outcast, which wasn’t nice" Indy Lall

“That was a bigger challenge than you might think because you’re dealing with young individuals – how do you structure them,” says Lall. But he found the process rewarding and has interesting thoughts on some of the youngsters, such as Nyck de Vries (“the most professional”), Ben Barnicoat (“a complete natural”) and Oliver Rowland: “As a raw talent he was close to if not ahead of Lewis.

“It was good fun working on the Young Driver Award with people like Mark Williams and Derek Warwick. It needed all your attention and you couldn’t be flippant because it’s people’s careers. I hope it can come back because we need drivers to be recognised and one way to do that is to put them in an F1 car.”

As testing restrictions increased after 2008, Lall was forced to go elsewhere. Initially he moved to car builds but that had well-established processes and Lall missed “thinking on your feet”. McLaren Heritage, resurrecting and running some of McLaren’s greatest cars – many of which he was already familiar with – seemed a good fit. “We were a small team and we started refurbishing what was already a good place for racing cars.”

When McLaren needed financial help in the 2010s, Dennis again came to Lall with a request: “Ron said, ‘Come up with a list of our best 20 cars we can look at refurbishing and selling’. While I was looking at the list I thought we’d end up giving away all our best stuff and keeping the cars people didn’t want, so I did two lists. When I went to see Ron and showed him the first list, he said, ‘I’ve changed my mind, we should start with the car we want to sell’, so I said, ‘How about this list?’ and gave him the second one.”

With testing restrictions introduced in F1, Lall was called up for a new role to set-up its Heritage arm

Photo by: Oliver Read

While Lall was working at Heritage, McLaren’s second Honda era began across 2014-15. It quickly became fraught and there was lots of internal criticism of Honda, which Dennis didn’t like so asked Lall to get back involved.

“I worked hard to get to know the Honda guys and they needed to be convinced I was on their side,” says Lall, who attended the pre-season tests. “Honda didn’t know how our team was structured and they thought I was there to watch them so I felt like an outcast, which wasn’t nice, so I knew it was going to take a while.”

When things were slow to improve, Lall was asked to go to races and then submitted an internal McLaren report during the summer break. When that was ignored, he felt the time to focus on Heritage had come, but remains a fan of Honda.

“History tells us the engine wasn’t the only problem,” he says. “When drivers are struggling to drive the car, you know it’s not just the engine.”

Lall then oversaw many of McLaren’s old race cars, a role that continued into the Zak Brown era. At one stage Heritage was moved out of the MTC and into Unit 2 “and we were left to our own devices. We decided to make it our own.” When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the team was concerned about redundancy so, because it was small, Lall was able to successfully ask to carry on working under tight controls and “half a dozen” cars were prepared during the troubles.

“It’s been super,” he enthuses of Heritage. “It’s good to see the cars up and running again. It’s sad to see some of them go, but it’s nice to see them out and about.”

McLaren designer Neil Oatley, who has known and worked alongside Lall since 1987, believes his colleague’s impact has been significant. “In those days people had a fairly rudimentary test team and it became clear it needed something better,” he says. “Indy took on that role and did a fantastic job for a long time. He’s incredibly conscientious and dedicated. Ron’s ideas did percolate down very strongly with people like Indy and Dave Ryan. The test team wouldn’t have evolved the way it did without him and he’s a very good people person. He can get the best out of people.”

The high regard with which Lall is held at McLaren was underlined by his last weekend at work, July’s British GP. There he ran Watson in the MP4/1 in which they had scored their first success together. It seemed an appropriate way to end a career during which McLaren won nine constructors’ and 11 drivers’ titles.

This extended article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the Summer 2026 issue and subscribe today.

Watson and Lall were reunited with victorious MP4/1 at this year's British GP

Photo by: JEP