McLaren’s Investigation

By Sam Cooper
April 18 2007

After Fernando’s disastorus race in the kingdom of Bahrain, the McLaren team are doing an investigation on to why he was slow, a lighting pod fell on his car, and by his pace, it did some damage.

After the teams dreadful mistake on Fernando’s car, the team will fully strip his car down to try and find exactly went on when the lighting pod in Fernando’s garage hit his car, the lighting pod is likely to weigh around a sixth of the cars weight, about 100kg.

When this hit the car, it is likely to do considerable damage to the car’s very complex aerodynamics, not to mention the safety cell.

This isn’t the first time that this has happened, back in 1999 where world champion Mika Hakkinen drove out of the McLaren garage and brought the roof down on his mechanics, luckily no one was seriously injured.

But how did McLaren look over the matter? The pod fell on the front of the car, this would of caused serious damage to the car, as the pod is likely to have fallen from at least 8 foot or 2.4 meters.

The front suspension is likely to be damaged from such a hit, not to mention the safety cell, the team changed the front wing, but it appears that a broken front wing wasn’t his only problem.

Fernando reported the car to have strange handling during the rest of the weekend, surely if Fernando thought his car was damaged, and there was a risk of him injuring himself or anyone else because of this, they could of got the chassis changed, and adapted Fernando to run the t car, with the same engine, as it would be on grounds of health and safety.

McLaren should be releasing a statement on the matter once they’ve found the problem, when we get it, we’ll let you know about it.