That Seat At McLaren

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Taking on Sam Bird would cut the engine bill to Merc as they want him in the sport. I think he'd be fairly solid too. Mclaren are far too dull to gamble on him though.
 
How about Alex Sims for a longshot?
Mclaren Autosport BRDC Young Driver of the Year 2008. F3 and GP3 experience. Sadly, didn't get a GP2 drive as his GP3 team, Status, don't compete in GP2. Has lately been driving for their LMP2 team however & showed good form at Le Mans this year in his debut, until the car expired a few hours from the end. Also signed up for 2012 as an official MP4-12C GT driver, so is well known to Mclaren. Could be in with a chance of test/reserve driver role if Gary Paffett were to be promoted to the race seat?
 
I feel a little bit sorry for Andretti, there was no way he could have succeeded under the circumstances. The fact that he refused to move to Europe didn't help either.
 
For Andretti, there were several problems he faced....
  1. He refused to move to Europe - nowadays, that would make his position untenable, since all the development goes on in the simulator!
  2. He was team-mates to a certain A.Senna....
  3. He had a very poor start, with accident after accident at the start of the race (More a legacy of the fact that he came from US racing...
  4. He had the weight of expectations on his shoulders - since he had the surname Andretti!
In fact, let's look at recent history... (The Ron Dennis years)

The rookies McLaren have taken on are:
Hamilton (Known quantity, as was with McLaren for many years before)
Jan Magnussen (Only filling in for Hakkinen)
Andretti (Indycar Champion)
Stephen South (Filling in for injured Prost)

So, they have only 1 rookie who survived more than 13 races for the team!
 
Marco Andretti has other ideas about his father's ultimate failure.

"If you ask me, it was sabotage," Andretti told The Associated Press on Wednesday, as he prepared for Sunday's Indianapolis 500. ``It was."

According to conventional racing wisdom, Michael Andretti didn't succeed in his lone F1 season because he wasn't committed enough, wasn't properly prepared or simply didn't measure up.

But Marco said people don't know "the real story" behind his father's poor performance that year, insisting the team tried to make his dad look bad so they could get rid of him and make room for a promising young driver – Mika Hakkinen, who would go on to win two world championships.

"They wanted him to fail," Andretti said. "I don't know, it was a very bad deal. The reality of it was, they had Mika Hakkinen ready to come in for a lot less than what my dad was getting paid, and that's all it was. Right then and there, they had to make him look (bad)."

Andretti said McLaren's efforts to sabotage his father's career went beyond simply giving better cars and engines to his teammate, Ayrton Senna – something that might be expected, given Senna's status as a three-time world champion. Andretti insists the team intentionally made his father's cars more difficult to drive.

"They would make the car do weird things in the corner electronically, stuff out of his control," Marco Andretti said.

The situation only improved, Andretti said, when Senna stepped in.

"And I think my dad's biggest supporter over there was Ayrton Senna," Andretti said. "Because he was one of the few who knew what was really happening in the team, and I think he believed in my father. It was at Monza that he really said, 'Give him my car. Give him exactly what I had."'
Click to expand

For the record, I don't necessarily subscribe to this theory, but I do certainly believe that it became very clear at some point to Dennis/McLaren that they needed to get Hakkinen into the car.


On a somewhat similar note, Alain Prost has no doubts that McLaren gave him inferior equipment and engines in 1989, and I think a lot of people believe him.
 
I'm guessing Marco Andretti is not going to be offered the Mclaren seat then.

Like Keke I'm not sure I believe all of that but it was pretty clear Mclaren(well Ron) wanted Mika in - I always thought it was veyr odd they let him go after his best result.
 
KekeTheKing said:
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On a somewhat similar note, Alain Prost has no doubts that McLaren gave him inferior equipment and engines in 1989, and I think a lot of people believe him.
Click to expand

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In Prost's case I think it was mostly Honda he dstruted, especially once it became clear he would no longer be driving for them the following year.
And he was far from the only one: a certain Keke Rosberg :) and Mansell publicly complained about something not quite right going on with their Honda engines after it was announced they would not be driving Honda engines the following year,
 
Errm, wasn't Alain Prost's rookie season at Mclaren in 1980 and Andrea de Cesaris in 1981?
 
Actually Dennis took charge immediately before Prost left to join Renault, and one of the first things he did was to try and convince Alain to stay. McLaren were truly in the doldrums at the time and Alain didn't believe Ron's assurances that he could turn things around, though he was impressed by his personality.
The McLaren M29 on top of being uncompetitive was an unsafe car, with repeated suspension breakages in 1980, two of which sent Alain crashing against barriers and forced him to miss races with fractures.
 
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