Paul Jeffrey
Premium
McLaren CEO Zak Brown has revealed McLaren's shocking lack of preparation on the build-up to their failed Indy 500 qualification bid.
Having endeavoured to return to the famous American race for the first time since the 1970's, and armed with their star driver Fernando Alonso, many would be forgiven for thinking that qualification for the Indy 500 would be a forgone conclusion - with most turning their attention to the question of if the team can pull off a famous victory. Sadly, reality proved McLaren to be far from up to the job in hand.
Whilst watching the qualification coverage at home, I just assumed that the McLaren car didn't have quite enough pace to make the top 33 session through the setup on the car and a lack of enough running in advance of qualification coming to a close on Bump Day, however according to Zak Brown, the team apparently made a number of critical and fundamental errors that sabotaged their efforts to appear in 'the greatest spectacle in racing' later this month.
The issues began before McLaren even arrived at the famous Speedway, with Brown himself having to go out in search of a steering wheel for the Vegas test session earlier in the month - something the team didn't get chance to include when building the car...
“We didn’t get out until midday, our steering wheel was not done on time, that’s just lack of preparation and project management organizational skills,” Brown said. “That’s where this whole thing fell down, in the project management. Zak Brown should not be digging around for steering wheels.”
The issues from Vegas were compounded yet further by the car arriving in the wrong shade of McLaren papaya orange, something the team brought up with technical partner Carlin who were set to prepare the spare chassis (and eventually the one Alonso used after crashing his race car on Thursday), an issue that took a month for the small British Carlin squad to rectify - costing McLaren yet more valuable track time at Indy.
Following Alonso's practice accident, McLaren then had to recover the repainted spare chassis from the Carlin paint shop, causing enough delays that the team would miss further on track running they could scarcely afford at such an important stage of the proceedings.
However, once back on track it would again be a tale of incredible incompetence from McLaren that prevented them from getting on the front running pace, something that Brown wishes he would have acknowledged and acted upon sooner in the process.
“I should have been closer to Indy but I could never compromise Formula One,” Brown said. “At 9:01 in the morning when we weren’t on track at the first test, that’s when we failed to qualify for the Indianapolis 500. We didn’t ring the fire alarm quick enough because we could have recovered after the first test.
“I am angry at myself because I was uncomfortable all the way up to the first test and I should have followed my instinct to get more involved.”
When McLaren failed to lock down a top 30 slot at the end of qualification day on Saturday, the team went about pulling in knowledge and resources from across the paddock in a bid to add more speed to their #66 machine, leading to the team heading out into the all important 'bump day' session with a brand new and untried setup - with one critical mistake:“I am angry at myself because I was uncomfortable all the way up to the first test and I should have followed my instinct to get more involved.”
“We actually had a 229 (mph) car but we had 227.5 gearing, so we beat ourselves again while we almost made it,” Brown said. “We really did put it all on the line and you could feel the anxiety. There was some real heroism in that. I don’t want the world to think McLaren is a bunch of idiots because while we did have a few, we had some real stars.”
“I feel an obligation to the fans and sponsors, we let them down. We didn’t fulfill our promise and I think they need more than just an apology, there will be repercussions for those who don’t deserve to work for a great team like McLaren. We will look at what we learned here and the list is a mile long. I hope people appreciate that we go for it, we are racers, and Fernando is a star and we are not quitters. We want to come back.”
Something of a tale of woe from the famous Formula One team, and plenty of very difficult lessons learnt should they come back for another crack in 2020.“I feel an obligation to the fans and sponsors, we let them down. We didn’t fulfill our promise and I think they need more than just an apology, there will be repercussions for those who don’t deserve to work for a great team like McLaren. We will look at what we learned here and the list is a mile long. I hope people appreciate that we go for it, we are racers, and Fernando is a star and we are not quitters. We want to come back.”
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