GPWizard F1 Forum
F1 News & Discussions => F1 Teams => Topic started by: cosworth151 on December 26, 2018, 04:25:07 PM
-
It's been 6 full seasons since McLaren won an F1 race (Brazil 2012). Zak Brown has a 5 year plan to turn things back around.
“I have just presented a five-year plan and within that plan, we think we have a journey to get back to winning races, and then once you’re winning races, you’re competing for the championship,” Brown said. “We have laid out a journey and investment, a road to recovery that sees us getting back to the front of the grid in that timeline.”
However.....
"There’s not a specific timetable in that X has to be achieved by Y date. I think what they want to see as we all want to see is us moving forward, but there’s no specific timeline on that.”
So, like the Pirates' Code, it's move of a guideline. ;)
https://racer.com/2018/12/24/brown-lays-out-five-year-mclaren-turnaround-plan/
-
Zak seems like a nice enough guy, but I fear his head is filled with straw and candyfloss!!
I just wish teams would stop giving forecasts of recovery and just "grow a set" and get on with business.
Season's Best,
Cal :)
-
I never quite understood how F1 has 'multi year' plans.
I understand team sports, where it takes time to assemble and train a winning squad. I understand skill sports where you need to develop a rounded suite of skills to compete in all the circumstances you need.
But in F1, it's a new car every year. If you have the worst car in 2018, it has nothing to do with the 2019 car, does it? Now, I appreciate that a deep pocketed team can hire better people,can afford to do different designs and find what works best. But that's not a multiyear plan, that's three months of development.
I suppose it's possible for people to learn how to make an F1 car year over year, but it's not like planning on a midfielder getting slightly faster, or a keeper jumping an extra inch through training.
-
F1 involves a very large squad of specialist staff, who would need to be set up in the same way as a football team (perhaps more so, as there are more people). Mercedes started researching for 2014 (the current regulatory phase) in early 2012, so if McLaren holds hope for a similar advantage in the 2021 regulations, it must start doing so in the next few months. Even if the regulations don't look close to settled at that point. Note that McLaren is a relatively well-heeled team, at least for now.
Within a particular regulation phase, improvement tends to be iterative (in that good cars have tended to be a refinement of an almost-as-good preceding car, with the difference being unlocked by money - only 3 teams spent less than $100 m for each second of improvement they got this year), so getting 2021 right is key if McLaren has hopes for a better 2020s than its 2010s are being.
The forecast is necessary - not for us, who can guess what the plan really needs to look like, but for potential sponsors to get that "$100 m per second of improvement" paid for.