Club Arnage

The PR people at McLaren must have just got back from their hols. Two announcements today:

McLaren to launch new sportscar http://uk.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUKTRE53F2OH20090416

McLaren chairman Dennis relinquishes F1 role http://uk.reuters.com/article/sportsNews/idUKTRE53F28120090416 and

And a Button one too:

Relieved Button getting used to being top man http://uk.reuters.com/article/sportsNews/idUKTRE53F2B720090416?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0

Not too sure what the last one has to do with McLaren .....  ;D

Hence the edit.  ;D

So So good to see that Mclaren are investing in the UK motorsport, car building skills, OK most of us will only dream of owning one but the creation of 800 jobs for skills that have lead the world in F1 is great news. I doubt if Berni will be an investor though, T**T.

you never know...  ;) there's rumour in the Austrian media about McLaren and Mercedes to part ways... I have no idea if there's any truth behind it or if it's just a journalist's rant.

Don't spread rumours or hearsay, they have a habit of becomming the truth.

Look what happened to the economy.

McLaren and Mercedes are not on speaking terms with regards to road cars (the race team is a different operation) and the new P11 road car will not have any Mercedes components in it.

Its fair to say if McLaren had been one the of the teams with the better design then the outcome of the case would have been different, and it would have been banned.

Given the new pace shown by McLaren in china, I wonder if they had a new design ready to be bolted on once the outcome of the protest was known. I can't help thinking that the Brawn - McLaren reletionship may be close as they share engines and maybe gearboxes. McLaren would have know what the brawn diffuser looked like before the other teams and had a plan in place once the outcome was known IMHO.
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More likely they were working on one as soon as they were declared legal by the Stewards in Melbourne (if not before)
And even more likely the reason for the protest was to get the 3 diffuser teams chucked out of the first 2 races, thus the points would go to other teams, and they were hoping they would be able to pick up some of those points...

They only have the same engines  ;) BrawnGP are using their own gearbox as far as I know.

"McLaren have been given a suspended three-race ban for misleading stewards at the Australian Grand Prix by motor sport's governing body, the FIA.
The British team admitted five charges of breaching Formula One rules at a special inquiry on Wednesday in Paris.
The penalty will only be enforced upon Lewis Hamilton's team if "further facts emerge" about this incident or if there is a "further breach" of the rules."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/motorsport/formula_one/8024661.stm

^ I believe that's specifically related to the "If Ron Dennis quits, then you're off the hook" section of the regulations.  ::)

Someone else brought this up today - it's preposterous that Max can accuse anyone of bringing the sport into disrepute.   ::) x 2.

I think they (McLaren & Hamilton) got off lightly!  Still at least we now know it's ok to lie to the stewards!  Just don't do it too often...

I'm afraid that the root cause of all this misery is the worst innovation known to motor racing - the Full Course Yellow and Safety Car routine. In all forms of racing this disturbs the race's natural progress, and can lead to a quite skewed result, simply because a car found itself in the right or wrong place via a vis the safety car, i.e. no fault of car, team or driver. This is the 21st century. Circuits - and F1 on street circuits - can afford simple technology for flashing yellows, rather than silly flags on every corner, and limit the yellow zone to that preceding the incident or local track condition requiring a yellow. Automated Gatso technology can be used to monitor speeds approaching a yellow corner. Then there's the "Pits are closed" arrangement, which is pure rubbish. The pits must be available to every car at every moment of the race, and it is the driver's responsibility to exit the pit safely. No Safety Car - no problem.