McLaren sporting director Sam Michael expects developmental race in 2012 – Formula 1 news
McLaren sporting director Sam Michael expects that this year’s development battle will really start to step up a notch in the coming races of the season.
The season has become a unique one because it has seen a seven Grand Prix winners out of the eight races completed so far in the season. It translates to fierce competition amongst teams to fight for the Constructors’ Championship and the Drivers Championship.
Red Bull at the moment is leading the Constructors followed by McLaren at second and Lotus at third. Fernando Alonso is leading the Drivers’ standings followed by Mark Webber at second and Lewis Hamilton at third.
Red Bull introduced a substantial upgrade to the rear of its car and Michael believes that it could spark an aggressive development race over the coming races.
He added that there is a lot of development still to come from teams and it will remain like that till the end of the season. Every team is going to be bringing these upgrades including McLaren.
He said, “I think the development rate this year is going to be really fierce because in the past there were things that maybe for half a tenth you would have lumped into something else, but it's not like that now. 50 milliseconds is one place this year,
sometimes two places, so you're going to be bringing gains that are tinier and tinier. It would be interesting to see what the gap between the top 10-15 is like from the start of the year, because it feels like it's getting tighter and tighter.”
He added those who are involved in the business are in it to win it obviously. In the heat of the moment if an opportunity arises to spend money to get more competitiveness any team will do it and how it is going to be paid off is decided afterwards. That
is something that gets the teams into trouble sometimes.
It will be interesting to see how teams go about developing their cars in the season as the competition gets tougher and more competitive after every race.
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