How a McLaren winner overshadowed by scandal was dealt self-inflicted setbacks

At least one of McLaren’s drivers could and should have won the 2007 world championship. But, owing to an unnecessary clash of egos between them (in which the team foolishly became a participant), and the steady drip of toxic revelations in the ‘Spygate’ scandal that year, McLaren was left empty-handed – and $100million poorer.

What a trajectory. The season began with one of the most extravagant launches ever as McLaren underlined the poaching of title sponsor Vodafone from Ferrari and double world champion driver Fernando Alonso from Renault with a street festival in Valencia. “I’m sure 2007 is going to be a year we’re all going to remember,” said team boss Ron Dennis in a crisply edited promo video from the event. It would, but not for the reasons Ron anticipated.

Signing Alonso had been a significant coup for Dennis, who swooped in late 2005 after a chance conversation with Alonso following the podium ceremony for the Brazilian GP. The deal was done in secret in a hotel room in Japan a fortnight later – without Alonso’s manager (and Renault boss) Flavio Briatore’s knowledge. In retrospect, this kind of backdoor chicanery, along with Alonso’s increasingly bizarre outbursts later in the 2006 season – where he accused Renault of sabotaging his campaign – should have acted as something of a red flag.

Then again, during that final year at Renault Alonso was fighting with Michael Schumacher and Ferrari – and therefore faced strong legal headwinds in the form of Max Mosley’s FIA, which almost invariably resolved any dispute in the Scuderia’s favour. Fans and the media even conjured a scabrous alternative acronym for the governing body: Ferrari International Assistance.

McLaren chief operating officer Martin Whitmarsh was more diplomatic when he spoke ahead of the MP4-22 launch. “When you take on Ferrari,” he said, “you take on City Hall as well.”

The MP4-22 was the first McLaren since the 1997 MP4/12 not to feature the touch of Adrian Newey in its conception, since Newey had been escorted from the premises by security when he returned from the 2005 Chinese Grand Prix and informed Dennis he was leaving for Red Bull, just over a
month before the first design meetings for the MP4-22 were convened. Nevertheless it bore a clear evolutionary look from its predecessor, even though aero chief Peter Prodromou had been poached by Newey late in development and replaced by Simon Lacey, formerly of Honda.

The MP4-22 was the first F1 car since 1997 that had no involvement from Newey

Photo by: James Mann

While the MP4-21 hadn’t been a great success, one reason for this was Michelin’s focus on Renault and servicing its requirements for a more rear-biased weight distribution than everyone else. Now all teams were on Bridgestones it was Renault’s turn to take a step back.

The new control rubber was claimed to have similar properties to Bridgestone’s 2004 tyres, offering a wider operating window with lower peak grip than the rubber Ferrari was using at the peak of the tyre war. Pre-season testing suggested rears were the limiting factor, more prone to degradation and giving cars an oversteer balance.

Another key point of difference in the 2007 F1 season would be the controversial introduction of the so-called ‘engine freeze’. Over the previous months the topic of homologation had been the subject of a tug-of-war between FIA president Mosley, still on his cost-reduction crusade, and the alliance of car makers involved in F1 whose unity and power Mosley and commercial rights holder Bernie Ecclestone wanted to shatter: the Grand Prix Manufacturers’ Association.

Dennis had a habit of falling out with his star drivers – as Kimi Raikkonen, having defected in rancorous circumstances to Ferrari for 2007, would attest – and it was not long before the relationship with Alonso foundered

Mosley had mooted what was in effect a three-year pause on engine development, which the GPMA countered with its ‘Indianapolis proposal’ – an allowance of one annual update paid for by a central €40m fund. This fell through after Renault, one of the GPMA members, retracted support for the compromise agreement and a number of independent teams refused to be party to it.

At the time the indies were scared of the prospect of manufacturers establishing satellite teams with customer cars, as Red Bull had done with Minardi/Toro Rosso and McLaren was in talks to do with Prodrive. The result was a political mess.

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Amid the infighting, Mosley got his way and brought in homologation for 2007. There was a certain logic to his idea: even though he had introduced rules forcing engines to last for more than one weekend, with penalties for unplanned changes, it was still standard practice for manufacturers to revise over 90% of the components within their engines when making development steps between seasons.

Homologation aimed to force down this kind of investment just as the ‘long-life’ rules had attacked manufacturing costs. In the event, manufacturers shamelessly exploited a concession allowing changes for reliability reasons to sneak through performance upgrades.

Mercedes was one of these. After McLaren excelled in pre-season testing, rumours circulated to the effect that Mercedes had found up to 30bhp as well as greater reliability.

Relations between McLaren's star signing Alonso and Dennis started off well, but didn't take long to deteriorate

Photo by: Sutton Images

McLaren also had a potential advantage in chassis dynamics. Late in 2006 Ferrari had succeeded where McLaren had failed in 2005, persuading the FIA to ban the ‘mass damper’ Renault had been using to benefit front-end performance. Although chiefly aimed at managing fluctuations in tyre load to benefit mechanical grip, this device – a sprung weight in the nose – also brought aero benefits and was therefore declared illegal as a moveable aerodynamic device. McLaren had licensed a similar but differently executed (ie legal) concept invented at the University of Cambridge by Professor Malcolm Smith,
and now enjoyed similar benefits.

Despite a regime change at Ferrari as team principal Jean Todt prepared to hand over to Stefano Domenicali, technical director Ross Brawn went on sabbatical and chief designer Rory Byrne retired, the new F2007 car designed under the aegis of long-time Byrne lieutenant Aldo Costa was also highly competitive. Described as an evolution of the 2006 car it was different in several details, including an 85mm longer wheelbase and a ‘zero keel’ front end.

With Renault in disarray, the 2007 season would be
carved up by Ferrari and McLaren on track but the battleground would be political, too. Dennis had a habit of falling out with his star drivers – as Kimi Raikkonen, having defected in rancorous circumstances to Ferrari for 2007, would attest – and it was not long before the relationship with Alonso foundered.

Alonso arrived believing he would be undisputed number one at McLaren. Since his partner was a rookie, Lewis Hamilton, he had every reason to believe so. But Hamilton had been guided by McLaren through Formula Renault, Euro F3 and GP2 with just one small wobble, and had been given extensive ‘mind management’ coaching by mental guru Dr Kerry Spackman. He arrived in F1 better prepared than any previous rookie – and with a strong emotional connection to the team as well as Dennis, whom he had doorstepped at the 1995 Autosport Awards.

Having just vanquished Schumacher to win his second world title, Alonso was at the height of his powers. And yet Hamilton ran him close through the opening rounds – later in the season he would even have the better of him in several races.

This did not compute for Alonso, who began to feel his team-mate was being favoured. On the other side of the garage, the burningly competitive Hamilton thought he was being held back to spare his team-mate’s ego – an impression inked in his mind when he was ordered to hold station behind Alonso in the latter stages of the Monaco GP (an intervention investigated by the FIA, since team orders were theoretically banned).

It was at this race where the first stirrings of what became known as ‘Spygate’ emerged as Ferrari fired long-time chief mechanic Nigel Stepney on suspicion of trying to sabotage the fuel tanks with detergent. In the coming months it would be revealed he had passed confidential internal design documents to McLaren chief designer Mike Coughlan with the intention of them both attaining senior engineering positions at another team with a wealth of frontrunning IP in their back pockets. Dennis, flabbergasted that one of his own should engage in such duplicity, went into denial and this would prove his –
 and McLaren’s – undoing.

Alonso kept Hamilton at bay to win in Monaco, but it bred the start of discontent between the two aces

Photo by: Rainer W. Schlegelmilch / Motorsport Images

The twists and turns of Spygate intertwined with the simmering disquiet in the McLaren garage. As the beginning of the Monaco weekend Hamilton was leading the drivers’ standings by dint of a string of podium finishes with Australian GP winner Raikkonen fourth. Monaco restored Alonso to the championship lead but emphatic wins for Hamilton in Canada – his maiden victory – and the USA reversed the order once more.

The championship was evolving into a tightly contested smash-and-grab as McLaren and Ferrari sought to maximise results at circuits which favoured their cars: the F2007 had better overall aerodynamic efficiency and tended to flourish at faster tracks, but its front wing was sensitive and tended to lose performance in traffic, while the MP4-22 was better around slow corners and ‘switched on’ its tyres faster.

Raikkonen inked himself in as a championship contender again mid-season with two vital wins at Magny-Cours and Silverstone. The latter was the most emphatically brilliant as Raikkonen unleashed clinically brilliant laps at the right moment to overcut first Hamilton and then Alonso at the pitstops.

Coughlan’s possession of the dossier was by now beyond doubt – but the real sting was the disconnect between Dennis’s insistence that this was a rogue employee acting alone and the somewhat murkier picture now emerging

In Hungary the schism at McLaren was writ large as both drivers disgraced themselves: Hamilton disobeyed a run-plan giving Alonso priority on track during the ‘fuel burn’ stage of qualifying (it was the Spaniard’s turn), and Alonso responded by blocking him in the pitlane. Hamilton was then late to the inevitably tense post-quali team press conference, claiming to have been watching the GP2 race, when in actual fact he had gone to the stewards. Alonso was hit with a grid penalty.

Behind the scenes Alonso threatened Dennis with revealing incriminating information in his emails regarding Spygate if he was not given priority. Though he later withdrew the threat, by then Dennis had apprised Mosley of the conversation.

It was this weekend which ultimately triggered the record $100million fine and McLaren’s constructor points being struck off. Coughlan’s possession of the dossier was by now beyond doubt – but the real sting was the disconnect between Dennis’s insistence that this was a rogue employee acting alone and the somewhat murkier picture now emerging, one in which rather more McLaren staff were aware of Ferrari secrets.

Victory in Japan while Alonso crashed out meant Hamilton entered the penultimate round, in China, leading the championship with a 12-point buffer over Alonso and 17 over Raikkonen. In Shanghai Alonso’s rage boiled over once more as Hamilton outqualified him by over six tenths of a second; in the McLaren team hut Fernando kicked a door off its hinges and suggested to the Spanish media he had been sabotaged by running the wrong tyre pressures (in fact Hamilton was on a lighter load so, fuel-corrected, was only 0.3s faster).

The Spygate affair caused McLaren to be issued with a record $100million fine while its constructor points were struck off

Photo by: Lorenzo Bellanca / Motorsport Images

A bizarre race then eventuated in which Hamilton dominated the wet early stages of the race on intermediates. In drying conditions both he and second-placed Raikkonen stopped for fuel only, since their tyres were now virtually slick. A brief shower of rain followed in which Raikkonen slipped by to take the lead.

Hamilton still had a large margin over Alonso but now the team dithered over whether to pit him for slicks – if the rain returned he might have to pit again whereas Alonso, who had more fuel, could afford to wait. McLaren waited at least a lap too long and Hamilton skittered into a gravel trap as he entered the pits, his tyres spent. Alonso duly finished second.

“We weren’t racing Raikkonen, we were racing Fernando,” Dennis let slip later, the clear inference being that McLaren’s focus had been on ensuring Hamilton finished ahead of Alonso. The Spanish motorsport federation certainly thought so and complained to the FIA, which despatched an observer to the Brazilian GP to ensure equal treatment.

McLaren’s blunder had brought its drivers closer together and enabled Raikkonen to gain ground. In the denouement at Interlagos – a track whose configuration suited the F2007 – Hamilton qualified second to Ferrari’s Felipe Massa but fell behind Alonso on the first lap, went off-track trying to overtake him, then fell even further back when a speck of debris momentarily blocked a hydraulic line, causing a gearshift malfunction.

An attempt to make up places by running him on soft-compound tyres with a low fuel load in his second stint backfired when he had to make a third stop, leaving him seventh at the end – equal on points with his team-mate and one point behind race winner Raikkonen.

A protest over fuel temperature in the three cars which finished ahead of Hamilton’s came to naught, but this hasn’t stopped a conspiracy theory flourishing that McLaren ‘threw’ the drivers’ title to avoid an outright ban on competing in 2008. Regardless of whether this is true or not, though, McLaren had taken on Ferrari – and City Hall – and lost.

Hamilton's off in China was a costly self-inflicted hit that served as a microcosm of McLaren's 2007

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / Motorsport Images

Race record

Starts: 34    
Wins: 8  
Poles: 8    
Fastest laps: 5   
Podiums: 16   
Championship points: 218*
*Drivers’ championship only 

Specification

Chassis: Carbonfibre monocoque 
Suspension: Double wishbones with pushrod-actuated inboard torsion bars 
Engine: Naturally aspirated Mercedes FO 108T V8
Engine capacity: 2398cc    
Power: 810bhp @ 19000 rpm   
Gearbox: Seven-speed semi-automatic  
Brakes: Carbon discs front and rear    
Tyres: Bridgestone  
Weight: 605kg   
Notable drivers: Fernando Alonso, Lewis Hamilton

McLaren should have won both titles in 2007, but lost both to Ferrari

Photo by: James Mann