What has gone wrong for McLaren in the 2013 F1 season?

McLaren are at 6th in the Constructors’ Championships table

A quick glance at the Formula 1 standings of the 2013 season so far will show that McLaren are at the 6th position in the teams’ list (below Force India), and their best driver, Jenson Button, is at the 10th position in the list of drivers. This has been a season very unexpected for a team from whom we’ve come to expect the challenge for title and race podiums every season. With no podiums to show so far, their best finish in a race this season has been Button’s 5th position in the Chinese Grand Prix.

Everyone has been left wondering how the fastest car at the end of the 2012 season, and also during the first test of 2013, could suddenly be stuck in the midfield. After a lacklustre display at the Spanish Grand Prix, Button said, “It was a bit embarrassing for us because we are not doing a good enough job. We’ve got so much support from the fans. We are doing everything we can to get to the front.”

Losing former world champion Lewis Hamilton to Mercedes, and getting a relative newcomer Sergio Perez as his replacement, meant that the going was always set to be tough for the team. The Mexican had impressed at Sauber, but has struggled to replicate that form at McLaren, making news more for the wrong reasons (incident with Kimi Raikkonen at Monaco).

Button had described the MP4-28 as the “best McLaren we’ve ever made” when it was launched, and things seemed to be going as per plan on the first day of testing at Jerez when the car impressed everyone with its performance. However it turned out to be just an illusion as the pace was due to a component being incorrectly fitted. While it wasn’t illegal to continue using the “incorrect fitting”, it’s not safe for a team to do fittings that are not consistent with the car’s design.

Team’s managing director Jonathan Neale feels that the problems in correlating data from wind-tunnel to real-world performance are the main reason for the team’s below-par performance. “I believe that it’s really important that we sort out the issues with the car and correlation,” Neale said, “because all of the time that you have got that lingering doubt – hang on a second, what went wrong where, how do we fix this – you’ve always got the opportunity for it to arrive again.”

The team would surely have been tempted to bring back the excellent MP4-27 from retirement, but have resisted from doing so to continue developing the MP4-28 instead. They believe that MP4-27 had reached the stage where it can’t be upgraded further, and though it’s likely to be among the best cars on the track right now, it will lose ground on the competition due to developments from other teams on their cars as the season goes on.

Some conspiracy-theorists feel that the performance issues could be due to the fact that McLaren have signed a new engine deal with Honda, starting from 2015. Mercedes would have been aware of this to be coming, and obviously not liking it, must have taken some steps to protect their interests. Force India, with their occasional success (despite a low budget) can be a proof of good performance of the Mercedes engines. While a success by McLaren, with their history of success and soon migration to Honda, won’t give much of the boasting rights to Mercedes.

Whatever be the reason, it’s clear that the MP4-28 car needs more time to be developed to be competitive with the Red Bulls et al., but unfortunately in a sport like Formula 1, time is what it’s all about.