Perhaps Spygate Was The Reason For McLaren’s Success
The 2009 Formula One season has been bad for McLaren. The poor results are raising a lot of speculation that perhaps Spygate was really key to McLaren’s success the last few years.
To say the 2009 season has been a disaster for McLaren Mercedes is a slight understatement. The Mercedes engine is quality as exhibited by the performance of Brawn using it. The same cannot be said for the McLaren part of the equation. The car was horrible to start with, but the scary sign is there has been no improvement at all during the season.
The inability of McLaren to design a competent car or improve it has reopened the door on the Spygate scandal. The scandal has been explained millions of time before, but here is a short summary to make sure we’re on the same page. An engineer for Ferrari was passed over for promotion. He looked for another job and took critical Ferrari design and technologically info and plans with him. McLaren ended up with the information although it didn’t hire him. This subsequently came out and Ferrari went ballistic. McLaren was fined $100 million and stripped of points. It was all very nasty and nobody really looked very good at the end.
There was, however, an odd thing about the McLaren performance. Prior to the 2007 season, the McLaren had been a middle of the pack car that would occasionally be blindingly fast, but was more likely to poke along and have a wing fall off. Then 2007 comes along and we have Spygate and Fernando Alonso come aboard. The 2007 McLaren is suddenly makes a big jump forward and is the class of the field.
The question for many is how did McLaren suddenly make the jump? Alonso is well known for being great at developing cars. He has generally been given a ton of credit and he sure made a difference. The extent that the Ferrari information helped has always been debated. Some think it helped a lot. Others think not.
2009 represents the first season since 2007 where a new chassis essentially has to be designed and used by each team. This is the year McLaren would prove that Alonso and Ferrari info didn’t matter. Well, it isn’t working out to well. The 2009 McLaren is reliable, but so slow that it was recently out qualified by a Force India car! Perhaps more damning, the team has been unable to improve the car throughout the season.
Did McLaren suddenly forget how to design a championship car? It is difficult to say. The fact Alonso is not there to help and the Ferrari technical and aerodynamic information no longer applies is hard to ignore. Perhaps Spygate was a bigger factor in the 2008 and 2009 success than we originally thought.