Tough times – they teach us the most

As widely reported, this weekend’s Italian Grand Prix marked the 50th anniversary of the founding of McLaren; not only a super-successful Formula One team with a 25% win-rate but a stellar player in the world of luxury supercars. Today marks the opening of four McLaren dealerships in China, its 27th retail territory, and at the weekend their Chairman Ron Dennis told a select audience that the McLaren Group would see its turnover exceed USD$1 Billion for the first time.

It is a trailblazing business, mimicking Ferrari in using Formula One to build a global brand, but paralleling that with a programme of diversification including high-end hospitality and the appliance of F1-bred technologies in other sectors. Their clever partnership with drugs giant GSK is just one example of McLaren’s spreading interests.

Why then is this F1 super-team without a podium finish to its credit this year, let alone a win? How can McLaren, along with Ferrari, Mercedes, Lotus et al, be trounced once again in the Formula One World Championship by a team owned by a slghtly sickly, fizzy energy drink?

The answer, though complex in detail, was summed up in a single word when McLaren’s Managing Director Jonathan Neale gave a teleconference back in May. Correlation. Ultimately the data generated at the design stage of the McLaren MP4-28 failed to correlate with the actual data gathered once it hit the track. Simply put, the car wasn’t anything like as fast as McLaren expected, and understanding why that happened has been a much larger focus for the team than finding quick-fixes for this year’s car.

It’s been tough season as Jenson Button and Sergio Perez have been left to make up the numbers rather than vying for victory. Naturally the team has faced criticism, notably from armchair theorists who feel that perhaps the diversification of the McLaren Group has led to the management taking its eye off the Formula One ball.

A quick look at McLaren’s structure tells a different story, however, for in Automotive and F1 the management functions have been separated to the most senior level. Very much as you would expect from a well run and thoughtfully structured business. Former Ford executive Mike Flewitt is CEO of McLaren Automotive while Martin Whitmarsh fulfills that role in McLaren Racing; I doubt the challenges of producing the McLaren MP4-12C, its Spider derivative and the £1m P1 get in the way of the Formula One programme, and vice versa. It would be too simplistic a problem for McLaren to fall foul of.

Correlation issues are not new in F1, and particularly in this data-heavy world where the virtual and the real often merge, but rarely equate. Anyone who recalls what happened to Honda when their hastily commissioned and poorly calibrated wind tunnel in Brackley helped deliver a car they’d rather forget about in 2007 will understand just how severe this problem can be. The numbers need to add up from day one.

For McLaren’s fans, however, comfort can be taken from the fact that the team has refused to give up on this year’s car, making sufficient progress to stand 5th in the Constructor’s Championship – a performance half the grid would die for. The resources of the team are such that it has not only continued to develop the recalcitrant MP4-28 and set about fixing the issues that Neale discussed back in May, but is well advanced in preparing next year’s car and the introduction of F1’s radical new hybrid powertrain technologies.

If anything, 2013 has served as a reminder of just how very tough and unforgiving Formula One can be, especially for those teams used to winning races year in, year out. Back in 1988, when McLaren famously won 15 of the 16 races, Ron Dennis said that the biggest problem with that performance was the expectations it raised for future seasons. Perfection can be hard to sustain, and it’s a fact of life that Red Bull Racing will no doubt be fully aware of.

Staying at the top in any business isn’t easy, but when the competition comes after you or things go wrong, it can often trigger fresh motivation, enabling you to emerge stronger. We learn more in adversity and from our mistakes than we do from winning and thinking we can do no wrong. For that reason alone I expect McLaren will bounce back strongly next season; the numbers will eventually add up once again, and they will emerge the stronger for this year’s experience.