How the McLaren MP4/8B's engine blow-up changed F1 history

Seeing - and hearing - the McLaren-Chrysler MP4/8B the other month in all its V12 anger set off a train of thought in my mind. What if McLaren had opted at the back end of 1993 to go with the US manufacturer for the following season rather than Peugeot?

Formula 1 history might well have been very different. And I’m not just thinking about what the British team might or might not have achieved in the years that followed had it not jumped ship to Mercedes after a solitary season with the French V10s. More so, about what effect a Chrysler entry would have had on the landscape of F1.

I prefer to call the V12 that ran in the back of the MP4/8B over a programme of tests totalling little more than 500 miles - 842km is the exact figure - a Chrysler rather than a Lamborghini. It’s what makes the tale of the short-lived programme so intriguing and why I stuck my hand up to write about it for Autosport.

That engine bore both names when powering a Larrousse, a Lotus, a Ligier or whatever, but in the McLaren it was most definitely a Chrysler. The marque’s Pentastar badge was front and centre on the cam covers when the B-spec version of the active MP4/B tested in the hands of Ayrton Senna and Mika Hakkinen at Silverstone, Pembrey and Estoril in the autumn of ’93. Had the deal gone forward, the engine in the back of the following year’s MP4/9 would have been a Chrysler and, more pertinently, paid for out of its not insubstantial coffers.

It would have been Chrysler’s first crack at F1 at a time when Ford was making a big push in F1 - it would, of course, go on to win the world title with Benetton and Michael Schumacher in ’94. So that would have meant two of the big three US automakers on the grid.

Which is exactly where we are today: Ford is finally back after more than 20 years away in partnership with Red Bull Racing. General Motors, meanwhile, has taken the plunge for the first time, using the Cadillac brand for its debut. It’s a seminal moment in F1’s story given the motorsport pedigree of both marques and their place in the automotive world’s psyche. 

Watch: Senna's Lost McLaren

But we really could have had two of the American grandees back in 1994. How close the deal for McLaren to partner with Chrysler came might never be known. We’ll have to wait for Ron Dennis to write his memoirs to get the low down on McLaren’s side of the story, while Chrysler’s has probably gone to the grave with Francois Castaing, the vice-president at Chrysler driving the negotiations with the F1 team.

The Frenchman, who died aged 78 in 2023, knew all about the value of motor racing in general and F1 in particular. He’d overseen Renault’s 1978 Le Mans 24 Hours victory technically and its early years in F1 before climbing the corporate greasy pole. He ended up in the US because he’d moved to the American Motor Company, then 50% owned by Renault, before it was subsumed into the Chrysler empire.

So if we’d had two members of the North American big three, would we have got the third? Certainly, there were on and off rumours in the 1990s that GM was interested in F1. Don’t forget that at the end of the decade, it started taking a more international approach to motorsport. 

Had the car reached a certain performance target, a clause in the contract between Chrysler and McLaren would have clicked in for 1994

Chevrolet’s Corvette Racing programme hit the track in 1999 and made it to Le Mans the following year. That was the same season that sister marque Cadillac entered the fray in pursuit of outright honours. The ill-fated Northstar LMP project was linked to the expansion of Cadillac into new sales markets around the globe. But what’s to say if Chrysler and Ford had been competing against each other in F1 that GM’s hierarchy wouldn’t have looked to the higher stage to achieve the increase in brand awareness it was seeking?

Had we had Cadillac or whatever GM brand racing against Chrysler in F1, then surely Ford would have hung around rather than stepping away at the end of 2004. It surely would have wanted to right the wrongs of the five-season Jaguar debacle when corporate America got it so blatantly wrong.

And what of Mercedes? Had it not partnered with McLaren, would it have gone on to achieve the successes it did as an engine supplier? And would it then have decided to buy Brawn after the British team gave it another pair of world titles in 2009? 

The McLaren-Chrysler MP4/8B project presents many a 'what if' in motor racing

Photo by: Sutton Images via Getty Images

There’s another point to consider here. Mercedes ended up merging with Chrysler - or rather buying it out - to create DaimlerChrysler in 1998. So, in my parallel universe, there would have been two F1 engines from the group on the grid at that point.

Would they have both survived? That’s another hypothetical question. If not, the most successful programme would surely have been the one to be given the green light to continue. We can probably take it as read that it would have been the one undertaken in partnership with McLaren…

Motor racing is littered with ‘what ifs’, so hypothesising about what might have been had the Chrysler V12 - call it a Lamborghini, if you will - pushing Hakkinen down the Hangar Straight at Silverstone in mid-October ’93 hadn’t grenaded itself can be nothing more than a bit of fun.

But my research on the MP4/8B project suggests that had the car reached a certain performance target, a clause in the contract between Chrysler and McLaren would have clicked in for 1994.

I firmly believe that a link-up between the two was very close. And I also believe that a race-winning McLaren-Chrysler MP4/9 would have had major repercussions on the history of F1. 

Check out Autosport's latest feature on when the MP4/8B made its track return

Photo by: McLaren