F1technical.net

Lowe believes that the situation McLaren finds itself in at this early stage of testing is already much better than it was after the conclusion of pre-season running last year - during which McLaren suffered reliability troubles with what it has now revealed to be a 'Fan tail' exhaust.

I think the trouble last year was that we had not got through the very process that I have just described. We didn't actually have a platform that we could work with, because the car was inherently unreliable in terms of exhausts.

There was a lot of confusion at the time, even internally. We had a radical exhaust system, which we can quite openly describe these days. People called it an 'Octopus', but it had nothing to do with an Octopus. We actually called it a 'Fan tail' internally because it was a fan tail pipe that went into a slot, which blew through the floor. That specific bit did not work and was quite problematic.

But the real problem with the car was that the contingency exhaust system – which we had put in place because with our quite radical system we knew we needed some sort of back-up that was more conventional – was even more unreliable. So, something pretty basic and pretty simple would not get the car around past 11 o'clock every morning. And because of that we had no stock, because we had not expected to need to have a lot of stock of something that should be as reliable as normal. So every day you would see how you could keep going with the shrapnel that you were looking at.

We never, throughout the three track tests we had, which was 12 days, reached the point that we have reached here of feeling we had a platform we can work with, because we were fighting the exhaust reliability all the way through. Not even until the very last day. It was only when we went to Australia, did we suddenly find in P1 and P2 that we had a car that could go around.

shelly wrote:Does that mean their floor was a double layer with exhausts flowing between the two layers, or is he referring to the lateral slit exhaust we saw in testing, similar to what toro rosso had?

n smikle wrote:Let us revisit some images.

Pup wrote:To be honest, I think McLaren tried every trick in the book last year. I remember that we had photos of exhaust nozzles coming out of the splitter, some midway down the sidepods, some at the very edge of the floor in front of the wheels, the slit exhaust that I was referring to, and who knows what else. The octopus, I thought, was supposed to be a device that would send the exhaust to any or all of those places. Though, if I remember correctly, we never saw more than one set of outlets visible on the car at any given moment. Maybe one day we'll have a first person account of what really was going on.

Pup wrote:Lowe didn't say where the exhaust exited - only that it went into a hollow floor.