McLaren’s managing director Jonathan Neale insists the outfit will continue to take risks with its 2012 car, despite a troubled start in 2011.
The Woking based team revealed a radical design for their MP4-26, both visually with the L-sidepods, and technically with a complex ‘octopus’ exhaust system. The latter development failed to run reliably and was dropped before the first race, hampering their championship efforts as the system was integral to their cars design.
Despite this failure, McLaren have and will continue to take risks in 2012, in the hope they can challenge for the title with the MP4-27.
“We’re in the business of taking controlled risk,” said Neale at Autosport International on Friday. “F1 is not a business where you can afford to relax at any moment of time.
“If you don’t keep that relentless pressure of development up, you go backwards. Red Bull, Ferrari, ourselves and Mercedes have, over the years, got quite good at that development.”
Having not won the Constructors’ Championship since 1998, McLaren are determined to learn valuable lessons from 2011, in which they managed six race wins.
“If you take a look at the number of races that McLaren has won over a 10 or 15 year period and where we have sat in the championship, we win races every year. There were only three drivers in 2011 who won more than one race and two of them were our drivers.
“But we are frustratingly just shy of that drumbeat of winning championships. Of course, winning matters most, both in races and championships. We’ve been there or thereabouts and McLaren should be fighting for a championship each year.
“It doesn’t always go like that and we have had our stumbles because we take risks. We stumbled badly last year and got into some reliability issues with the car, maybe we took too big a bite on some things that we paid dearly for.
“Over the winter, we didn’t get the maximum use of that precious testing time. Of course that is in our mind at the moment, but you can’t be defensive. If you want to win races, you’ve got to push really hard. We must not be risk averse and not do these kinds of projects.”
McLaren confirmed they will reveal their car at the McLaren Technology Centre (MTC) in Woking on February 1st, whilst its track debut will take place in Jerez on February 7th.
