The real question about the McLaren launch

There has been much discussion on the Web in recent days about McLaren launching its new car on February 4 in Berlin. In the finest tradition of the F1 world, it seems to me that everyone is asking the wrong question. The issue is not why McLaren is launching later than other teams, but rather why on earth is this event happening in Berlin. The team makes it quite clear that the venue chosen has “space restrictions” and it is laying on a charter for British media from Gatwick – which is not a cheap thing to do – so there has to be a very specific reason why the team has picked the city.

Berlin is a strange city in that there is not one single company listed in the Dax 30 index that is headquartered there. Instead Berlin has developed into a hive of innovation. The city boasts four technical universities and large numbers of creative start-up companies in the old buildings left empty in the post-industrial era. Berlin is all about biotech, telecommunications, media, optics and energy. Daimler recently invested in its factory there, with the intention of building electric engines for hybrid cars there, but that is not what F1 is about… So it is a bit of a mystery

The Kaisersaal is not a particularly spectacular venue. A neo-Baroque hall, it used to be part of the Hotel Esplanade, where Kaiser Wilhelm used to entertain his pals. It was famous for tea dances in the 1920s, which is not really a McLaren thing. It was badly damaged in wartime bombing, revived in the 1950s and was then right next to the Berlin Wall and off limits in the 1960s, although it was used for filming various movies. After the wall came down the hall was incorporated into an exciting new development known as the Sony Center. This is a development built around the European headquarters of Sony, from where the Japanese company oversees its electronics empire in Europe. McLaren already has a number of consumer electronics partners, such as Aigo, Kenwood and Lenovo, but perhaps the secret of the launch is Sony. There are certainly synergies with the team’s primary sponsor Vodafone… but, who knows?

Whatever the case, there is more of a story there than in speculation about why the cars will not be running in the first week of testing. It is not unusual for the bigger teams to sacrifice some testing in order to gain development time. A week may not sound like much, but in modern F1 every fraction of speed gained is important. It is not a new concept and while the Jonahs will always look for a reason: a conspiracy or a failed crash-test, it is more likely these days to be something that is planned. If one thinks back to the McLaren MP4/4 in 1988, this was sent off to the first race which almost no testing at all, but Ayrton Senna put it on pole position by half a second in the opening race in Brazil and it went on to win 15 of the 16 races, with 10 1-2s, which at the time was the most dominant performance ever seen.

Last year Red Bull missed the first tests and while the team did later have some reliability problems, the car was the quickest overall, all year.

McLaren says the decision to miss the first test was made some time ago, and I see no reason to disbelieve that.

“It’s a balance because now we have very short winters and we are developing cars to very complex technical regulations,” says Martin Whitmarsh. “We have chosen to give our aerodynamicists and engineers an extra 10 days – which doesn’t sound much but in Formula 1 terms that’s a long period of time – to find more performance. It was always our intention, regardless of how people interpret it, and at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. What matters is whether the car is quick enough to win races and the World Championship over the course of the season.”