Seven Tenths of a Second, page 11
That drives me nuts in business. You sit there, pushing at a door that does not open. How many times are you going to try to open that door? That door doesn’t open. So instead of pushing at it and getting the same result over and over and over, go to a different door.
I have this thing in the office where I authorize anyone and everyone to call a timeout. A timeout is when we’re all sitting around the table, we’re talking about the same thing, the results are the same, we’re going around in circles, it’s not working, but no one feels a sense of ownership because it’s ten people around the table.
At that point, it’s, ‘You know what, guys, how many times are we going to run this play? Timeout. I call a timeout.’ Time for a new play. Time to recalibrate. Time to do something different. Time to stop following the duck across the street.
And so I come up with this crazy idea that we should race Fernando at the Indianapolis 500 in May. I’m not sure it’s going to fly but I have dinner with him and his manager during the Chinese Grand Prix weekend at the beginning of April and suggest it to him.
Fernando says, ‘Let me sleep on it.’ His manager is unsure. He says he thinks Fernando will go away and sleep on it and then say no. ‘It’s not gonna happen,’ he says as he walks away after dinner. Except Fernando sees me the next morning and says he wants to do it.
I’m a bit shocked. Now I’ve got to figure out how to get it done. Before China, I’m thinking maybe there’s a 5 per cent chance of getting it done but now that percentage has got a lot bigger.
Fernando to the Indy 500 is a timeout. We’re going nowhere in the F1 season, finishing down among the dead men every race, or not even finishing, or not even starting. We’re not going to be able to fix that problem overnight.
So what can we do differently to make McLaren exciting again? That’s where I come up with this kind of crazy idea. I go to my chairman, Sheikh Mohammed, who is a proper racer, and he immediately gets it and backs it.
And that’s a big vote of confidence for me so early on, that they’re letting me do something so radical. Sheikh Mohammed comes to the same conclusion as me – Fernando’s going to finish sixteenth or something at Monaco, if he finishes at all, so what do we have to lose here?
Also, Fernando is getting frustrated as hell the longer the season goes on. He’s having a miserable time. Let’s give him the ability to try something new that we might be successful at, let’s give him a shot at history, let’s get him in a better frame of mind. And when we do it, it’s huge news that no one sees coming.
There’s something magical about the idea of Fernando having a go at the Indy 500. It’s recognized as one of the great races and it’s part of the Triple Crown, the three biggest prizes in motorsport, with the Monaco Grand Prix and the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Only Graham Hill has ever won all three, and there are a small bunch of drivers – and only two active ones – who have won two elements of it. Juan Pablo Montoya is one. Fernando Alonso is the other.
Fernando has won the Monaco Grand Prix twice, in 2006 and 2007, and at this stage he is weighing up a run at the 24 Hours of Le Mans at some point in the future. As it happens, he will go on to win Le Mans twice, in 2018 and 2019.
He’s trying to put the pieces of the Triple Crown together. He knows that it represents his best shot at proving he’s the greatest driver in the world. He’s got to a point in his career where he knows he is not going to match the number of world titles won by Michael Schumacher or Lewis Hamilton or Juan Manuel Fangio.
But the Triple Crown? There’s something properly alluring about that. Only one other man has done it, and now the challenge of emulating Graham Hill is starting to appeal to him.
Imagine what that says about you if you can win those three great races. It doesn’t just bracket you with Hill, but it conjures up images of legends like Jim Clark and AJ Foyt, sepia pictures of the heroes of old, and it puts you in the pantheon with them.
So I put together a deal with Michael Andretti and Andretti Autosport and with Honda and we run Fernando in a papaya McLaren-Honda-Andretti car. The McLaren entry marks the first time we’ve competed in the Indianapolis 500 for thirty-eight years.
The publicity about the news reminds everyone that McLaren won at Indy with Johnny Rutherford in 1974 and 1976, and so already Fernando’s involvement is starting to generate the first positive publicity we have had in a long time.
Fernando does everything right in the build-up to the race. He works incredibly hard and wins a lot of respect from the American auto community for the rigorous, professional approach he adopts.
Sometimes, Formula 1 drivers patronize IndyCar, but Fernando doesn’t do that. He keeps the car out of the wall in qualifying and puts it in fifth place on the grid. The team’s impressed with him, and IndyCar legends like Rick Mears, Al Unser Jr and Mario Andretti are impressed with him, too.
In the race, he looks comfortable and at home on the oval, even though he’s had nowhere near as much experience as the rest of the drivers. He’s quick. The Andretti cars look like the class of the field. Fernando has a stint leading the race. He’s never lower than twelfth place.
He’s in position to be involved in the race win in the last thirty laps, but then on the 179th lap, twenty-one from the end, his Honda engine blows up and the adventure is over.
Short of him winning the race, I couldn’t be happier with how the plan works out. It’s the first thing I’ve done at McLaren that has my fingerprints on it and it’s intoxicating to be on the world stage like that. The fans love it. Everybody loves it.
We go from being the talk of the town for all the wrong reasons to being the talk of the town for all the right reasons. The thing is a huge marketing success as well. Jenson Button takes Fernando’s place in the team in Monaco and we set it up so that Fernando calls him on the team radio just before the start. ‘Take care of my car,’ Fernando tells him.
So then everyone in Monaco tunes in to the Indy 500 after the race and it becomes a worldwide event. It’s awesome. If my best commercial deal has been the Crown Royal deal that got the NASCAR spirits ban lifted, this is my favourite on-track deal.
No one’s done it since, apart from us; it comes out of left field, and it puts McLaren back where they belong, not yet winning races again but being a global leader in motorsport and a brand associated with excellence and endeavour and bravery and ambition.
It’s hugely successful commercially and a great way for us to deliver value to sponsors I know we are letting down. In terms of performance, Fernando led twenty-seven laps of one of the most high-profile motor races in the world, and the experience cements our working relationship forever.
I’m happy with my part in it, too. I think it shows creativity and bravery. Christian Horner says before the event that he thinks ‘Zak’s insane’. But it shows I’m not afraid to make decisions and do things differently. It shows I don’t necessarily like to follow the rules or the herd.
A few voices say we should be concentrating on F1. They say Indy’s a needless diversion. They say it’s a distraction. I disagree. There’s a symbiosis there. What we do at Indy helps the F1 season, too.
At that point, we’re low. The McLaren brand needs help. Fernando needs help. The team needs help. The fans need help. And this helps. It keeps our sponsors happy. It makes our fans proud again. Our morale is stronger. Everything is stronger.
My relationship with Fernando is stronger, too. My biggest racing regret is not being able to race with Fernando when he is in a first-class racing car, because I think he is one of the greatest racing drivers of all time.
He has a reputation – totally undeserved in my opinion – of being difficult to work with, but I get on with him unbelievably well. I love racing with him. He’s a great friend and, sure, it’s nice when he calls me a marketing genius and the best team boss ever in the FIA press conference.
He knows how to work it but that’s cool. When you’re in your first year in Formula 1 and you have someone of Fernando Alonso’s calibre throwing those types of comments your way, it’s a very nice compliment.
We hit it off from day one. I think the racer side of me plays a big role in that. I don’t have his talent but I understand his mindset. I sense when he’s in a good mood and I know when he’s in a bad mood and I know how to work with him in both those situations.
I have a fabulous experience with him when we have very few results to show for any of his talent and hard work. I’ve never seen a driver want to drive as much as him, other than Mario Andretti, and I’ve never seen a driver give it his all, whether he is racing for eighteenth or first, as much as he does.
I truly believe if he was in the Mercedes during their era of dominance, instead of some other lesser cars he drove at the height of his talent, he would have won many more championships.
He is as good as anybody. It is my loss that the 2017 Indianapolis 500 is the only time I can give him the machinery that puts him at the front of the pack. It’s only a brief glimpse of his mastery but it stays with me to this day.
Chapter 12
Weekend Warriors
When Fernando Alonso races his last Grand Prix for McLaren in Abu Dhabi at the end of the 2018 season, he’s doing doughnuts on the track and I open up the radio channel. ‘Let’s go win the Triple Crown together,’ I say.
By then, we’ve announced we’re going to run our own McLaren team at the Indianapolis 500 in May 2019 and that Fernando will be driving for us. He won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2018. He’s got one leg of the Triple Crown left to achieve. We want to bring the same energy as we did in 2017, and this time it’s going to be all our own work.
Instead, it’s a car crash, literally and figuratively. We don’t even qualify, let alone race. After it’s done and we’re still red in the face with embarrassment about it, the Associated Press call it ‘a comedy of errors’ and they’re absolutely right.
It’s a failure, and it’s my failure as much as anybody’s, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing positive about it. I learn more about leadership and decision-making in one event than ever before. It’s the best worst experience of my business life and my first real blemish at McLaren (but probably not my last).
In 2017, we compete with the help of the Honda-powered Andretti Autosport team, but by 2019, McLaren’s relationship with Honda is over and there is no great appetite to rekindle it for the purposes of a shot at the Indy 500. That rules out another collaboration with the Andretti team.
And anyway, I want us to do our own thing. I’ve been thinking about entering a McLaren team for the entire IndyCar season but I decide against it this year. I know, though, that running our own team for the Indy 500 can be a building block to running a team in the future.
The plan is born from the right instincts. It’s ambitious. It’s aggressive. I think that expanding our operation and running in a formula like IndyCar will help the F1 team. The exchange of ideas and the exposure to some of the competition in the US can only be a good thing.
But in this first foray, this first attempt to ramp things up, I get it wrong. It’s on me. The first thing to say is this: I get the wrong people to do it and I underestimate the job in hand. My fault. Everything is my fault. And the position I take and will take to this day is everything in that farrago is my fault because the buck stops with me. I put the wrong team together.
I don’t actually know how to run a racing team yet. I haven’t got the experience at that point. The last thing I want to do is take human resources away from the F1 team. So I have to find people from elsewhere. I hire people who are good talkers, people I get on well with.
I get Bob Fernley – who passes away in 2023 – to run the team for the 2019 Indy effort. Bob’s a great guy. He’s genial. He’s popular. He runs Force India, as deputy team principal, before it’s bought by Lawrence Stroll. He’s got experience in IndyCar. He’s been around the block. He’s keen, he’s enthusiastic.
He’s experienced, but he isn’t experienced in the right way. He’s been to the Indy 500 but not for a long time. He and the people around him also underestimate the task in front of us. They believe in themselves but they’re not real with themselves. I soon start to realize I’ve put together a team of weekend warriors without the right leadership.
The biggest mistake I make along the way is not trusting my instinct. So the first time we go in the wind tunnel, Bob sits down with me and says, ‘We found ten points of downforce.’
I’m staggered. I say, ‘Really?’ ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘we found ten points.’ I mean, ten points of downforce is a huge amount. And I’m saying to myself, ‘Okay, Roger Penske’s won this race seventeen times. He’s competed in it fifty times. And in one wind tunnel session, we found something Roger Penske hasn’t found?’
It doesn’t feel right to me. But they’re getting carried away. They’re gung-ho. We’re going to kill it. We’re going to win it. We’re going to smash this. Two weeks go by, and then someone comes in and says that the change we’ve made isn’t viable.
It turns out we put the radiator in a different location when we’re not allowed to do that. That’s why we’ve found ten points of downforce. So we have to scrap that change and now we haven’t found ten points of downforce any more.
That’s just one example. There are plenty more. Most notoriously, perhaps, there’s an issue with the steering wheel. There should never have been an issue. We could have bought a steering wheel off the shelf from Cosworth.
But the guys in charge of the team say, ‘We’re McLaren, we can’t have a part that says Cosworth on it.’ I ask them if having our own steering wheel will give us a performance advantage. They say no. It feels like a lot of time and money to waste and risk with very little reward.
So we make our own steering wheel and we run into problems. They don’t know how to fix it and it totally compromises our Indy 500 preparation. Things are that bad; it feels like it’s amateur hour.
We get to the test at Texas Speedway in the second week of April and we’re not ready. I have to get a steering wheel from Cosworth the week before, but it’s still not ready to go on the car. The car’s not ready to go out on the track. The track opens at 9am. We don’t get out until midday. It’s lack of preparation and project management organizational skills.
Then there’s the paint job. The car’s the wrong colour. It’s orange but it’s not McLaren papaya. We buy the car from technical partner Carlin, but when we receive it, it’s not papaya. So it has to be repainted after the Texas Speedway test. And then there are more delays with that and no sense of urgency.
When Fernando crashes the car during official running time in Indianapolis a lot closer to the race, the spare is in a paint shop thirty minutes from the track, still not ready. That’s more than a month after we complain about the colour. It’s a joke. It’s a fiasco. It costs us two full days of track time when other cars that crashed the same day are back on the circuit a few hours later.
It makes us look foolish. Carlin is a two-car team when we agree our collaboration with them but they expand to three for the Indy 500. They’re stretched. They don’t have the resources to extend to us.
It’s clear they aren’t capable of running three cars and serving us, something I should have identified at the beginning. It is significant that Carlin entrants Max Chilton and Patricio O’Ward fail to qualify for the race. Partnering with them is another bad choice because, clearly, they just need to focus on their own team.
It feels like we are a bunch of amateurs. I hate to call us that but that is how it feels. What we’re doing is big and grandiose but there’s nothing to back up the words. We think we’re the smartest guys in the room but we’re a disaster.
There’s no reason we couldn’t have been fully prepared. I make decisions early. I give everyone plenty of time. And yet we go to the first test in Texas totally unprepared. There are red flags the whole way through this.
There are so many times I should have called a timeout because it is clear it just isn’t working. But I’m focused on Formula 1. I’m just not paying enough attention. And so we get to the month of May and we’re slow.
I should have been closer to Indy but I could never compromise Formula 1. At 9.01 in the morning when we aren’t on track at the first test, that’s when we fail to qualify for the Indianapolis 500. We could have recovered but we don’t ring the fire alarm quick enough.
I’m angry at myself. I should have got more involved.
It’s basically an unfolding disaster. The car has an electrical issue during practice at Indy. Fernando has another electrical issue on opening day for the 500. Fernando crashes on the second day and we miss all of day three, rebuilding a spare that is finally proper papaya.
Fernando goes into qualifying on an unsure footing. His first run is disrupted by a puncture. The puncture isn’t spotted before he goes out because the team has purchased incorrect tyre sensors.
Whether he’ll even qualify for the race or not goes down to the wire. He winds up one of six drivers in the ‘Last Row Shootout’ on the final Sunday of qualifying, and the scale of what’s unfolding becomes more and more obvious.
Fernando goes out to practise on Sunday with an entirely new set-up. No one’s slept. Everyone’s grumpy. One of the engineers is exhausted. He makes a mistake converting inches to the metric system and so the ride height is wrong and the car is bottoming out on the first lap. It has to be fixed. Fernando only manages five more laps before rain ends the session.
When he makes his last shot at qualifying for the race late on Sunday afternoon, he goes out in a car that’s basically an experiment. It’s not tried and tested. I tell him this because I want to make sure he knows the full facts and he says he wants to go for it anyway.
And we go to do one set-up change and we put the wrong gear ratios in. We’re rolling the car back for our final qualifying run and someone comes on the radio to me and says, ‘Zak, you’re not going to believe this, we’ve got the wrong gear ratios in, we’re done.’
