A Battle over McLaren

By Sam Cooper
April 12 2007

Germany is beginning to get picky over the national anthem played when McLaren win, surely there’s nothing to fuss over, after all the car is made in England, so why is Germany getting so fussy?

It may be hard to see why they are acting like this but there is a reason, and to be fair it’s a hard situation to solve. Mercedes (who are German) say that their race was a triumph for the three pointed star (the Mercedes logo). But was it, it could have been a triumph for the new MP4-22, who knows?

The main problem lies as you can’t power a car with out an engine, and you can’t make a engine move fast around a circuit without a chassis, its one of those situations where you need two things to make the complete product, like you need a driver for a car to move, well… you do at the moment.

Yes, the German manufacturer Mercedes does own the most shares in the team, but don’t the Kingdom of Bahrain own some of McLaren?

Which brings me onto another thing, shouldn’t the people who make the car get their national anthem played as well? The designers, the technicians, the engineers who create such excellence back at the McLaren technology centre, or should the person who invented the techniques that the McLaren team use, should they be credited by their national anthem?

The three pointed star gets the McLaren MP4-22 through the straights, but does it get the car round the corners? No, as you need steering, a driver to administer it, brakes, and some downforce.

Now if you were thinking like the Germans did, then they all should get credited by their own anthem, like the British anthem gets played when McLaren win, shouldn’t we all get credited for what we do?

Michael Schumacher’s retirement hurt the German public, they now did not have a reliable German anthem that would be played at just about every grand prix. There is Nick Heidfeld, but he may not win this season.

So, what can be done? We could ask the FOM(Formula One Management) to play both, but then it would be a case of who gets it played first. Could we play both at the same time? Not really as it would sound horrific.

So, we’ve established that we cannot play the British anthem as it would upset the Germans, and we can’t play the German anthem as it would upset the people back at Woking, not to mention the rest of the British audience.

So lets not have an anthem at all, lets just stand in silence, or lets celebrate the country that hosted it, or why not have the podium celebration all together? As one team are pointlessly bickering about nothing. Any person that watches Formula one regularly will know that Mercedes power McLaren, and sometimes that’s to victory.

The meaning of having a podium celebration is so we can celebrate that the drivers have finished the race safely, and that three men have finished in the first three places, which is a real achievement now that Formula one has become so competitive.

What we could do is make a half German, half British national anthem, which would take a lot of doing, and you would get very little back from that.

The only way I see this going anywhere is by keeping the national anthem when McLaren win the same as it has been for many years, and stop arguing about an anthem, and focus on winning that world championship that they deserve.