mclaren_mircea wrote: ↑17 Dec 2022, 23:10
diffuser wrote: ↑16 Dec 2022, 23:57
mclaren_mircea wrote: ↑16 Dec 2022, 17:10
Is there the posibility that some good chunks of former Mercedes F1 engineers remained with the Formula E team after the team was taken by Mclaren... These men if they exists have to be gold... They are engineers who worked for Mercedes F1 team in the best years of the team. And now... maybe Mclaren if they are the employeer they can take them from the Mclaren Formula E team to the Mclaren F1 team. Those men has to be much worth than everying Alpines or Aston Martin are poaching from aka Williams F1. Mclaren can send someone like James Key to the FE team and get in to the Mclaren Racing to make that Mcl37 a good car.
Don't forget everything was new for 2022. The breaks the tires the suspension, everything. They woun't repeat the brake problem causex they now have tons of data. They've also collected tons of race data on the floor. Not sure how good the CDF was prior to this year without real world data. I think many of the midfields went conservative and went in the "general" direction that the 2021 car was going, from the chassis skin perspective.
Just like McLaren offered Ricciardo a Nascar drive, you don't send your best engineers to the E team. Plus the teams don't manufacture. The cars are manufactured from 3ird parties. They just use the hardware and perform setup work. Atleast that's how I understand it. This coming year they'll have the Gen3 car.
I mean... I wanted to say as an elegant way to get rid of James Keys conservatism and lack of courage in the design choiches of the car that is starting to hamper Mclaren.
I think many teams(early McLaren Merc, Williams and Alpine) went with an extension of 2021 when it comes to chassis skin design. Ferrari and RBR went thier own way respectively. With regards to the Ferrari, it really went a different way. The Ferrari PU purchasers all look like they got a look at what Ferrari was doing, they all came with a variation on the Ferrari theme. You could probably argue the same about the Merc PU purchasers as well(except Aston). From a midfield perspective, conservative was a good way to go for 2022, remember, many of the subsystems (brakes and suspension rule changes) were completely redesigned for 2022 and they had no data on those or the new floor aero. I doudt CDF models were much good with the little data they had collected. So I think when you're in the midfield and lack the tools the big boys have, conservative is good. The other option is you risk going the Aston route where you find out early on that you've gone the wrong way.
That being said if they have another bad year Key will start to feel under pressure to be removed. It doesn't look good going into 2023 for McLAren either. Alpine were ahead coming out of 2022, having already been running 2023 ride heights and having the faster car. Aston after starting far back looked to have caught up and were coming on strong. They both have their sights set on 4th in the constructors or better. Don't remember when the competion for 4th was ever this strong.
