McLaren creates new in-house team after Mercedes knowledge gap
McLaren won its first race of the season in Hungary, but has a solution for any potential power unit deficits.
McLaren technical director for performance, Mark Temple, has said the team has put a specific group of people in place to understand how to make the most of Mercedes power.
McLaren is one of Mercedes’ power unit customers, and team principal Andrea Stella admitted at the start of the year that a new set of regulations left McLaren needing to gather information quickly to keep up.
McLaren creates power unit performance team to maximise Mercedes engine
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As a works team, Mercedes will likely have wanted to make use of any advantage it can as, despite having three power unit customers in McLaren, Alpine and Williams, these teams ultimately remain on-track rivals in Formula 1.
Perhaps naturally, then, the early part of the year saw Mercedes able to extract maximum performance from its engine while others sought to catch up, despite having power unit parity.
Stella even acknowledged after the season opener in Melbourne that “since we are a customer team, this is the first time that we feel we are on the back foot” in this new regulation set.
To combat that, Temple, one of three technical directors at McLaren, said the Woking-based squad maintains a strong working relationship with those at Mercedes High Performance Powertrains [HPP], while having put its own solution in place for its own understanding.
“There are new roles,” Temple said via McLaren’s official website.
“We have a power unit performance team now, which we didn’t have before. They’re focused on understanding how we get the most out of the power unit.
“They’ll study track data and work with race engineering but also use our simulator and offline tools to maximise our performance.
“It’s definitely a new set of skills, and a new way of working – because these are things we didn’t really need to worry about before.”
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Temple added that, while presented with a “multitude” of possible ways of going racing over the course of a race weekend, the nature of being power unit customers is such that, while McLaren will have its say over what it wants from an engine design, the final say remains with Mercedes.
Part of this new team, then, is to react in the best way possible when it is given its working possibilities of a race weekend, though it remains a “very collaborative” process between McLaren and HPP from race to race.
Asked how works teams were able to maximise performance from the off where customers couldn’t at the beginning of the season, he elaborated: “I think some of it comes from how much influence you have over the design and the installation.
“We do have considerable input, but ultimately MGP [Mercedes Grand Prix] have the final say with HPP on what happens.
“That shouldn’t be taken to mean we’re ignored – we’re ultimately just not the ones in complete control.
“The way HPP work on a race weekend is with a main team and customer support teams. We work very closely with our customer support team and have good relationships with people in the main programme.
“From that, we have influence on what’s happening within the main programme – but we don’t have guarantees they’ll accept things we request.
“We’re a little out of the main loop in that respect, working in a side loop that feeds into the programme, but it means we don’t always get the configurations we want and that would suit us.
“It’s the same with the timeline. In the run-up to a race, we receive information from HPP, but there’s decision-making and evolution we’re not part of.
“When we find out what we’ve got, there’s often not a huge amount of time to react and respond – so part of what we’re trying to do this year is build and improve our process to make this less of a limitation.”
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