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McLaren’s miserable Formula One campaign reached its nadir at Sunday’s Bahrain Grand Prix as one car failed to start and the other did not finish … but the team’s fortunes could soon change thanks to innovative technology which they trialled for the first time last weekend.
The team printed race-ready’ parts for their McLaren MCL32 car in order to quickly integrate design modifications and reduce its weight, as part of an expansion of its partnership with 3D printing specialist, Stratasys.
The parts include carbon-fibre reinforced nylon material hydraulic line brackets, rubber-like flexible radio cables, brake cooling ducts and rear wing flaps, which help increase the rear downforce on the car during high speeds.
3D printing has reduced manufacturing time from weeks to days or even hours, which helped the team during testing and when readying its cars for the race.
Neil Oatley, McLaren Racing’s design and development director, said: “We are consistently modifying and improving our Formula 1 car designs, so the ability to test new designs quickly is critical to making the car lighter and more importantly increasing the number of tangible iterations in improved car performance.
“If we can bring new developments to the car one race earlier - going from new idea to new part in only a few days – this will be a key factor in making the McLaren MCL32 more competitive.”
The team, partly-owned by Bahrain’s sovereign wealth fund, Mumtalakat, will be hoping that the results start to show rapidly, as they continue to fall behind the rest of the field and encounter increasing difficulty with their engine partnership with Honda.
After retiring from the race with engine failure, two-time F1 champion Fernando Alonso was sarcastic about his team’s glaring shortcomings and lack of speed after he returned to the garages, an event even more humiliating considering his team had actually installed a new power unit the day before.
“The deficit in power and performance we had on the straights today was amazing. Sometimes I looked in the mirrors at the beginning of the straights and saw the other cars 300, 400 metres behind, so I forgot completely about that car and started changing settings on the steering wheel and doing my own things. Then, the next thing I see is that car alongside me.”
His frustration was further evident in his prickly radio messages. In one of them he said ‘I have never raced with less power in my life’ and in another he replied ‘Do what you want, man’ when an engineer suggested a back-up plan.
But at least he got on the track, which is more than his teammate Stoffel Vandoorne did. Vandoorne, who made his debut in the kingdom last year when Alonso was injured, was meant to start from 17th on the grid, two places behind Alonso, but never made it out of the pits.
Understandably, McLaren’s racing director Eric Boullier left Bahrain in a downbeat mood. He explained: “Well, what can I say? Fernando failed to finish and Stoffel failed even to start. It was a bad day, there’s no point pretending otherwise.”
However, he’ll be hoping that something as simple as a printer will be able to make the world of difference come the Russian Grand Prix and beyond.
