McLaren’s third wave of greatness

As Bruce McLaren drove his Mercedes to Goodwood that fateful June day in 1970 he will have passed wheat fields of golden promise not quite ready for harvest. His own team, founded four years earlier, was in a similar state; not quite ready yet but with a bountiful harvest to come.

Poor Bruce didn’t get to see the glories his efforts would yield – and is continuing to yield – across three evolutions and six decades. The original version of the team was taken to glory by his partner Teddy Mayer but by 1980 was facing potential oblivion, only rescued by the ambition and vision of Ron Dennis. And so the second generation of the team took shape and in time came to redefine what an F1 team was.

But eventually the spinning plates got out of sync – when Ron’s mutual visceral and political antipathy towards FIA president Max Mosley came simultaneously with an internal driver war. That was particularly damaging long-term. The later – and connected – loss of Mercedes as a partner, the premature Honda relationship, plus internal politics at senior level (and within the engineering group) was a catastrophic combination. At this point McLaren was in much the same shape as in 1980 – in danger of oblivion. So the third evolution of the team emerged but financially Zak Brown was walking a tightrope and on track by the end of 2018 it was often fielding the slowest car.

“It’s about fine-tuning a precision instrument, maximising the talents”

Zak not only walked that tightrope, but while doing so found his magic ingredient in Andrea Stella. He’d arrived with Alonso from Ferrari in 2015 but his value in bringing harmony to the unhealthy silo mentality which had been choking the engineering group was perfect for the moment. And merely the springboard for much more. For a return to the great days.

The third evolution of the team is quite different to the second, which was all about Ron Dennis’s shock-and-awe approach to domination – the biggest budgets, a re-imagining of the scale of an F1 team, the biggest-name drivers, the superstar tech directors and that driving ambition to pulverise the opposition.

This version is about fine-tuning a precision instrument, maximising the talents within and getting them aligned towards the magnetic pole of depth of understanding. The facilities are good but not greater than the best of those elsewhere, they remain a customer team, no longer in partnership with a manufacturer, and they’ve grown their own superstar drivers and technical staff. They’ve remained humble but they work in harmonious synchronisation to uncover the differentiating secrets.

Some of McLaren’s best stuff in the Ron Dennis era came from something akin to a warzone. Always fighting external or internal foes. It was a powerful energy and its progress was often accompanied by lightning forks of controversy.

But friction is an energy loss and this version of McLaren has managed to minimise it to a remarkable degree. The challenge in the remaining part of this season with only the two McLaren drivers realistic title contenders is going to be managing the friction.

If we think back to the team Bruce was building as he drove to Goodwood to test the Can-Am car, there are parallels. Bruce was low-key but charismatic and created total devotion of a super-skilled but equally low-key bunch of people. There was very little friction around or within that version of McLaren. It hadn’t yet achieved its potential but the foundations Bruce and his partner Teddy Mayer were putting in place would in time make it the best team of its era, the team which gave us the M23 and world titles with Emerson Fittipaldi and James Hunt. Super-slick, thorough and with a fine-detail understanding of what made the winning difference.

Without doubt some of that frictionless quality disappeared after Bruce’s death, as Mayer was a much more combative character, just as you’d expect of a New York lawyer. But at the helm, Teddy was directing a beautifully honed entity. Just as Andrea Stella is currently doing. But Teddy never had the headache of managing his drivers fighting each other for the sport’s biggest prize. Ron Dennis did –and in each case it led to one of them leaving, psychologically exhausted. Senna did to Prost what Prost had done to Lauda a few years before.

It’s a nice challenge to have but it’s a challenge nonetheless. Meantime we can look forward to an epic Piastri vs Norris second half of the season.

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