I have been giving some thought as to why McLaren, with their extremely strong driver pairing, their great resource and technical ability, have always managed to be at the front or thereabouts but struggle to reach the ultimate goal. Of course, we can point to their strategy problems but if we ignore them for a moment where else could we look for issues and is there something perhaps fundamental somewhere in their philosophy?
On thing that gets thrown around and causes a lot of problems is the driver equality issue which we can only speculate on and will always be fruitless. there is somewhere else we can go with this, though, and it is the idea that neither driver is overly important in the design process. That the drivers are a component of the car and not that the car is an instrument to be wielded by the driver. After all, introducing the driver into the design process is to introduce a human factor into the design process and McLaren come across as being quite against that sort of thing.
"We build the car, we do what the computer says, you get in and drive it".
Could this explain why their form changes from circuit to circuit and shifts from driver to driver? Could they achieve better results by focusing more around a driver and what they want from a car than focusing on the car and then what they want from the driver? As reports could be interpreted, Fernando Alonso is quite headstrong in elevating the pilot and standing as an imposed divine purpose for the engineers, at least, in his Ferrari environment. Quite the opposite of the balance that I observe at McLaren.
Just my rambling thoughts.
On thing that gets thrown around and causes a lot of problems is the driver equality issue which we can only speculate on and will always be fruitless. there is somewhere else we can go with this, though, and it is the idea that neither driver is overly important in the design process. That the drivers are a component of the car and not that the car is an instrument to be wielded by the driver. After all, introducing the driver into the design process is to introduce a human factor into the design process and McLaren come across as being quite against that sort of thing.
"We build the car, we do what the computer says, you get in and drive it".
Could this explain why their form changes from circuit to circuit and shifts from driver to driver? Could they achieve better results by focusing more around a driver and what they want from a car than focusing on the car and then what they want from the driver? As reports could be interpreted, Fernando Alonso is quite headstrong in elevating the pilot and standing as an imposed divine purpose for the engineers, at least, in his Ferrari environment. Quite the opposite of the balance that I observe at McLaren.
Just my rambling thoughts.