Lewis Hamilton A Back Runner in 2009
The thrill is gone! The first qualifying session of 2009 has verified the obvious. Lewis Hamilton is a back runner in 2009. The McLaren Mercedes is a terrible car.
The offseason has not been kind to the McLaren Mercedes Team. While competitors have been whipping around the track, the McLaren car has been showing surprisingly poor lap times. Stalwart fans have argued that McLaren has simply been sandbagging and the first race would show their true pace.
Fans were right. McLaren was sandbagging. The offseason testing did not reveal how bad the car truly was. The McLaren MP-24 is a disgrace. What happened? Fernando Alonso was good for half a second on the last car. He’s gone, so some drop off was expected but this? Did the entire team take the winter off? Perhaps World Champion Lewis Hamilton should have left the Pussycat Dolls singer alone and actually worked with the team on the car.
Just how bad is the McLaren Mercedes MP-24? The team staggered to get out of the first qualifying session. To their credit, they just did and qualified 14th and 15th. Still, a look at the times tells you all that is needed. Hamilton qualified 1.2 seconds behind the pole position. Keep in mind the final qualifying session is usually slower than the first and second sessions as the teams must have enough fuel on board for the race proper. This means the McLaren may be as much as 1.75 or 2 seconds slower than the pace.
So much for sandbagging!
Perhaps the thing that makes the failure of McLaren so glaring is the pole sitting team. Brawn GP is running around on the same Mercedes engines that McLaren uses. This is clearly not an engine issue. Mercedes has done its part. It is the McLaren chassis that is failing to meet the necessary standards. The boys sitting on the Mercedes Board of Directors might wander why they are spending so much money on McLaren when they can just sell engines to Brawn!
Is there any hope for McLaren? The honest answer is no. Coming back from deficits of .2 to .5 a lap is doable. 1.5 seconds? Not a chance. The only way the team might be able to do it is to follow the lead of Brawn, Toyota and Williams in developing a new diffuser. With in season testing banned this year, it is very hard to figure out how the team would do that.
The best hope for McLaren is to follow in the steps of Brawn GP. This year is a lost cause. Write it off. Start developing the 2010 McLaren and through the MP-24 on the junk pile much like McLaren did with the MP-18 that never even saw the track once.
Lemmy