Whitmarsh uncut: how McLaren went off-course

McLaren ended 2012 with the fastest car in the Formula 1 field and confident of a 2013 championship challenge.

But it eschewed the successful formula of its 2012 machine and instead came up with a radical design for the new season.

The team was adamant at its launch that this avenue offered greater development potential and that to simply evolve would have been insufficient, despite most of its rivals taking that course.

McLaren's theory was soon proved wrong. With over half the season gone, it is yet to take a podium finish, let alone a race win and rather than chasing the title, it is chasing Force India for fifth in the constructors' table.

In a candid interview with AUTOSPORT's group F1 editor Jonathan Noble, McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh opened up about the mistakes that had sent his squad's season off course, the lessons learned, and how close it came to ditching the 2013 design and reviving last year's car.

AUTOSPORT: Is it too simplistic to trace these problems back to a single meeting where a decision was taken to follow a radical route?

Martin Whitmarsh: Inevitably it is too simplistic, but in a way I don't think that's a bad analysis. If you look back on it, the root of where we are today is probably around a year ago. I don't know the date, I've tried not to go there, but now you've asked me to...

Clearly nine, 10 months ago we had the fastest car. So we looked foolish at the beginning of this year to have abandoned quite a lot of the elements of that, not evolved it and had a step backwards.

Inevitably people say 'why did you do it?' And I think the simple answer is ambition, and ambition getting the better of you.

Winter testing suggested McLaren was in for a tough year © LAT

The feeling was 'how do we make a step?' The goal is to come out with a dominant car. There are a whole lot of studies that are going on all the time. The feeling was 'right, let's try to make a big step. Let's incorporate this, this, this and this'. We believed all the tests we'd done validated those concepts and the best thing to do was bring them together.

We brought it together, but it didn't come together in a harmonious package. We lost sight of the overall structure and we ended up with a situation where we were uncompetitive.

In the meantime we actually had a parallel programme developing last year's car and we made a reasonable amount of progress on last year's car.

So you can look at eight or nine months ago when we had the fastest car, but the decisions were taken already by then. The decisions that would now be either challenged, regretted or whatever, had happened.

People said 'you had the fastest car, why don't you just bring it back?' And we got close to doing so in Malaysia.

But I think it would not be quick enough now because our competitors have evolved their cars, made progress, and we're behind.

I think we lost those four months or six months of development, and that's difficult to catch up with good competitors.

I think we're learning a lot, not just about the obvious thing - which is when you've got a competitive car with relatively stable regulations, have greater due diligence before you make wholesale changes to what you have.

But technically we're learning. The whole flow structure around the car is dramatically different and we're tuning and adjusting that.

I'm an optimist, but you can learn more from mistakes and having to really question yourself, soul search and do the analysis of what you have to do.

When we gathered in Malaysia to think about going to China with last year's car, the feeling was 'is this going to get us to a winning situation this year? No. Will we learn much from doing that or will we learn more and be better prepared by persevering with it?'

The team came close to racing last year's car © LAT

I actually do think that overall it's been a very painful but powerful learning exercise.

As soon as something's not working as predicted, you've got to find out why. That analysis is quite a beneficial process.

Often you get a perfect storm of things. There were a number of things that went frustratingly wrong that lulled us into a false sense.

What went wrong fundamentally was that in the ambition to have a dominant car, there were about four or five concept changes to what ultimately appeared to be a competitive package. When you're developing the car, you say things like 'maybe we should have a different suspension geometry?', 'maybe we should have a different wing philosophy', 'maybe we should have a different sidepod?'. You do those things in isolation and you try to be diligent about. One thing appears to give you something, another thing appears to give you something. Then you stick them all together...

If every one of those is worth 0.1s, you put them all together and it seldom gives you 0.6s or 0.7s, and generally doesn't give you the 0.5s. In this case it certainly didn't.

Inevitably we know a lot more now than we did at the beginning of the year or this time last year.

AS: Did Paddy Lowe's departure hinder the recovery this year?

MW: Paddy was effectively with us until the car was launched. With all due respect, and I'm not blaming anyone, Paddy was the technical director through this process. But having a good mind like Paddy involved could have been beneficial. But we've got some good minds working hard on it.

AS: You say five elements didn't work together. Was there one thing that was particularly costly?

MW: No, we lost control of the overall flow structure. What you tend to have in an aerodynamic development team is people who are working on the front end or the front wing, or the rear floor, or the sidepods... You have a little bit more compartmentalisation than you would like and the organisation has to pull together a synthesis and make sure that there is actually some synergy and cohesion between all those elements. I'm not trying to blame any particular element, we just didn't pull it all together.

Sometimes you're lucky in life and you stick all the elements together and they do add up. Sometimes they just don't.

Lowe left the team early in the year © XPB

There were times when it's come good and we didn't really know why. At the end of last year, some of the developments overperformed. And that was another thing that caused this: we're always looking at the correlation between full-scale windtunnel and CFD, and there's always an offset between those, and we work on that.

The imperical and the analytical analysis is never perfect. Last year at the end of the year we were actually over-delivering at the track. That was another thing that I think has exacerbated this situation - that the real [2012] car was actually better than the windtunnel.

So certainly at the beginning of this year we were underdelivering at the track compared to the windtunnel, whereas last year's car was overdelivering.

The other thing is that as we got closer to the season, the pressure mounts on every part of engineering to deliver performance. So in the case of aerodynamics, we were growing downforce but at the expense of rideheight sensitivity.

So we ended up with some reasonable headline figures, but as we did that, we had a much more rideheight sensitive set of figures at that time. It looked fine, but at the early races we were very, very rideheight sensitive, which had all sorts of implications. One was that in order to get that performance you had a car that was much, much too stiff and much, much too low. It was a pretty uncomfortable car to drive.

AS: What have you changed to make sure this doesn't happen again?

MW: I think we'd lost a little bit of the link between the trackside aero team and the aero development team. By reason of personality, evolution, lack of diligence, that had become weaker than it needed to be. I think we've recognised that that had to change.

Every week you're reviewing aerodynamic options and making decisions, and there wasn't sufficient input from the 'real world' aerodynamcists and engineers about what was useable performance.

In the run-in to the start of this season, people felt the pressure to deliver downforce. They did so, but effectively they were delivering aerodynamic performance that was very difficult to obtain in the real world.

I understand the pressures that caused it, but that happened. I think also strengthening the control of the aerodynamic sub-groups to make sure that the sum of the whole really is in the right direction, rather than hoping that it's all going to add up together.

McLaren is convinced it has learned from its mistakes © LAT

AS: The drivers seemed more positive in Hungary. Is it all coming together now?

MW: I think we've done some decent learning and there's an enhanced confidence in what we know about the car and what we have to do. We've got a direction. There's a feeling that we can get more out of this car.

AS: How confident are you that you're not going to go down the same alley again next year?

MW: I'm confident of that, but no one can be confident that you're necessarily going to deliver enough performance next year.

What is a competitive benchmark? Who's going to make the breakthrough? I think we're going to have a much bigger spread of performance at the beginning of next year.

Some people will have overperformed. It's not all about good judgement and good decisions. You might claim that when you're competitive, but sometimes you'll luck in to a zone.

Everyone's going to be excited, wary and interested in what's going to happen next year. We have a very significant set of rule changes and there's going to be a greater disparity in car performance and a greater variety in car design. No one's going to be comfortable in the run-in to next season.