McLaren, they are second most successful team in formula one history. They are currently a billion dollar company being worth a total of $1.1 Billion. In 1985, they started creating cars, with their own engines in them. Yet the stayed until this day a customer team. They have cars with McLaren engines, but they choose to be a customer team to Renault. Why?
It cost for a whole year, a suspected $40 million for an engine
They happen to have created some brilliant and beautiful cars, can we all agree? The P1, what a stunning car. It ran a 3.8 L Twin-turbocharged M838TQV8, and had an electric motor too, as it is a hybrid car. This car, did blow so many people away, to say it stopped production 3 years ago is crazy because we all still want one. (Jenson Button is selling his if anyone want to pay that price) The P1 cost a whooping $1.15 Million. Yes, it will set you back that much.
See, McLaren, they build these amazing machines in their automotive brand, yet McLaren have not even seemed to think about building their own engine. They’ve created car after, after car. Built their own engines for these cars but the place where that name all started they have never built one of their engines for.
Engine building in formula one is not cheap, and the development is not cheap either. To talk about it again, an engine to buy cost 1 million pounds. Well if you look into the rumoured budget of Mercedes, it seems like it is a stupid price to design, build and test these engines. I guess Mercedes, Renault, Ferrari and Honda can’t just build for themselves as they have customer teams to build for too.
But McLaren, they get that special bonus. The amount they are spending year to just waste away in the midfield is unreal. It cost for a whole year, a suspected $40 million for an engine deal. So, if you take the money they are pumping into Renault right now, they could just that money and build their own engine. Each of the current manufactures has built cars which are brilliant, and McLaren are no different. They happen to not just build cars like the current manufactures, they build luxury high end cars so it is not like the cars are causing them a loss?
So money is and cannot be an excuse. The fact they have focuses all over could be. They create cars and race and create formula one cars. So is it a chance this could fall into the answer? Possibly, they don’t want to. The time it takes to create these engines is unreal. Mercedes had been working on their engine 3 years before it got into the car. We all heard those rumours larking of how good the Mercedes hybrid engine would be, look it turned out to be true. The time it has taken Ferrari to finally just be on terms with Mercedes is a whole four years and one whole rule change, it is somewhat mad, is it not? So the time scale they have before the next rule change, they won’t have a McLaren engine in there, until at least after 2021.
But if McLaren built their own engines, it could be better for them as a team. They’d be a factory team able to have everything to themselves and know what is going in the car and what will fit the car perfectly. They had to ask Honda to have an engine to specifically fit their car, and it turned to be a disaster, so having their own engine could fix this. However, there is no reason to say this engine they would build would be good. But if it was? It would only benefit McLaren, it would benefit them highly.
So why don’t they build their own engines, well, you can’t really answer it but right now in a time where they are building toward success again, there is no reason why they should not take the risk. Look they are taking a risk on their drivers. But will they build their engines anytime soon, probably not.
Comentários