ME4ME wrote: ↑05 Aug 2022, 15:29
What I'm suprised about the most is what warrents the confidence of Piastri in Mclaren? Yes Alpine and Renault have been poor in making year-to-year progress and are a bit of a joke sometimes when it comes to management.
But lets be honest about Mclaren. Two main issues:
- They have a bad record when it comes to junior drivers. They messed up with Perez, Magnussen, Vandoorne. Admittedly they have had a change in management since then, and Norris has since succeeded.
- They haven't created a top car in ages. They blamed Honda for many years. Then got found it when they got a Renault and then Mercedes engine. One particular year it was a disaster, car didn't work. Something to do with the flow around the front tyres. That year was a write-off. Since then, still no great car. Arguably still one of the most hit/miss cars on the grid. Still a costumer engine, unlike Alpine.
Carlos and Norris made the team look good for a while. For made it would've made much more sense for Piastri to drive for Alpha Tauri next year and get into the Red Bull when Perez leaves. At least thats a race and championship winning team, and AT is a lower pressure environment.
There are 2 questions there, why is he joining McLaren instead of Alpine and why is he joining McLaren instead of AT with a potential Red Bull seat in the cards…
I’ll try to answer the second one first with a question (I know, not very polite to do it that way), but was he offered a seat at Alpine, was that even in the cards? Forget about going to Red Bull afterwards, it is all contingent on a potential AT interest for him that may not have been there… Red Bull / Marko are known for sticking to their young driver program and with the exception of Perez, they have operated that way for a long time.
In regards to picking Alpine versus McLaren, maybe the most important part in this is that up to Thursday of last week, he didn’t had a seat in F1 for 2023… Vettel was racing for AM, Alonso was staying at Alpine with a 1+1 and for all we know, he may have been offered to Williams in a loan, but Williams didn’t offered a contract (or it wasn’t attractive for him)… If the timeline of events reported is on the ball park, he had a contract signed with McLaren before there was a seat available for him at Alpine… Based on that alone, it wasn’t much of a picking the better team situation, it was a situation of having a seat in 2023.
Why McLaren if they haven’t build a winning car in the last decade?
- I believe it’s unfair to not acknowledge the handicap that the Honda engine was for years, a lot of fans extrapolate the performance of the MCL33 to those of the McLaren - Honda cars in terms of chassis and that would be inaccurate since there wasn’t a lot of carryover between the cars in 2015-16 and 2018… Unless one could put another engine in one of those cars that carried Honda and raced them back to back, we can only especulate.
- The hybrid era is also one in which the teams have been able to apply learnings year over year, with regulation changes and tweaks, but with knowledge base that you could carryover… We are experiencing this year how detrimental for the MCL36 development was to miss laps in testing because of the brakes, how they’ve used practice sessions to recover the loss time and how development has been stalled because of it… Go back to the Honda years and imagine how much development time was lost because of not been able to run testing and practice sessions because engines were blowing up left and right, how much did the gap to the rest increased every time that happened? We can’t underestimate that
- There is an expectation for McLaren to fight at the front, been best of the rest like in 2020 and 2021 (because, even when finishing P4 behind Ferrari, they were still best of the rest considering the “Top 3”)… Are we going to ignore the fact that during the whole hybrid era the Top 3 teams have operated with budgets that are more than twice what McLaren was spending per season? Between the different build capabilities in infrastructure and potentially twice the amount of engineers, designers, etc (for example, Mercedes bringing 2 different cars to a single winter testing, while other teams struggle to bring one)… Are we surprised that they were behind them all these years?… Unless McLaren would have started spending 1 billion per season, they weren’t winning a Championship in those years because it wasn’t just a matter of been in equal footing, it was a matter of catching up too.
Yes, we have a budget cap now, but the effects will take a few seasons to be realized… There is still a gap in technology and knowledge between the top teams and the rest that won’t be closed in a season or two.
lol