220 mph, 17,000 rpm, 500,000 lines of code: Fast-forward computational dynamics are in the driver's seat of today's F1 cars. This isn't just a race - it's a technology war.
Just north of Milan's fashion sprawl and south of Lake Como's glistening shores sits the flat suburb of Monza, a slow-moving little burg with a huge park and a few cafés. Today the place is at a standstill, which isn't surprising. It's a muggy afternoon. It's Friday. It's Italy.
But inside a concrete structure surrounded by the Autodromo Nazionale Monza's 3.6-mile, 13-turn racetrack, everything is frenetic. In a spotless, high-security garage, pale-skinned men wearing the gray-and-black uniforms of Team West McLaren Mercedes are banging on keyboards and staring hard at rows of computer monitors. Others scribble figures on pads of paper. Another group works feverishly to fit a wind-cheating skin over the thigh-high, carbon-fiber skeleton of a multimillion-dollar Formula One race car.
"They'll work until the car is OK," says my escort, team publicist Wolfgang Schattling. "If we are in trouble, they're here until midnight, and then here again at 6 am."
The team's top driver, Mika Hakkinen, enters the garage through a back door, dressed in a silvery suit that looks just right for an extraterrestrial. All systems are go. He puts on his helmet and squirms into the car's narrow cockpit. Everyone slides sound-insulating headphones over their ears as the car's engine abruptly belches to life. One of seven computer monitors - called battle stations - displays the machine's vital signs amid the rising, blunt smell of intense heat on metal. The motor revs to a howl; after reaching critical thrust, the McLaren MP4-15 screeches out of the garage.
Monza, we have liftoff.
Hakkinen is heading out to the track for a practice run before Sunday's Italian Grand Prix. Understandably, the prerace hype has focused mainly on the drivers: men who, in less time than it takes to read this sentence, subject their bodies to acceleration from 0 to 125 mph and such intense, organ-flattening g-forces that they can barely breathe. But while Formula One racers are amazingly talented and durable athletes - the exhausting 190-mile races happen every two weeks from March to October - success in the high-stakes world of F1 depends on the geeks behind the scenes. These meticulous engineers and race directors work tirelessly to prevail in the sport's most grueling competition: the technology war.
"It might look like the flag drops and we all just go off after each other, but it's not that simple," says Ron Dennis, team principal of McLaren International, an English race-car company that is one of F1's dominant players. "The discipline you have to bring to the technical exercise is extreme. One weak element and you're not going to win."
Dennis is famous for stressing the power of precision engineering. The 53-year-old Brit is a former race-car mechanic, and some of the top hires in his 350-person outfit have backgrounds in aeronautics and aerodynamics. McLaren spends an estimated $250 million annually on its Formula One cars and staff; it's partnered with mega-manufacturer DaimlerChrysler, the Stuttgart, Germany-based automaker that provides McLaren's F1 entries with Mercedes-Benz racing engines. (West, the title sponsor, is a European cigarette brand.)
The dweeb approach has paid off: Hakkinen, McLaren's Finnish superstar, won the Drivers' World Championship (the most coveted title in Formula One) in 1998 and 1999, and last year narrowly lost out to Ferrari's Michael Schumacher, a German driver. McLaren has been so successful that DaimlerChrysler recently paid roughly $450 million for a 40 percent stake in its parent organization, the TAG McLaren Group. DaimlerChrysler wants a high profile in Formula One because the sport attracts more television viewers worldwide than any athletic event except the summer Olympics and World Cup soccer. The company is also looking to McLaren to help build an outrageous consumer-market Mercedes supercar that will be produced in 2003 at McLaren's still-unfinished, futuristic headquarters in the London satellite town of Woking.
Through it all, McLaren's fundamental goal remains the same: winning F1 world championships, an increasingly difficult task in a sport whose only constant is innovation. The 2001 season starts on March 4 with changes that will challenge every team. Michelin is entering the Formula One scene, determined to produce tire designs that will push its own engineers and the competition to rethink known limits of grip. This year, there's also the potential for a significant, technology-altering rule modification - one that would allow teams to rewrite engine-controlling software code in a way that will significantly increase race-car traction. Meanwhile, an influx of resource-rich companies - BMW and Jaguar entered the F1 fray in 2000, and Toyota plans to debut in 2002 - will be complemented by the resurgence of Ferrari, which is returning with F1's most talented driver (Schumacher) and a budget rumored to be larger than McLaren's.
As for McLaren, Formula One's most prolific team is apparently squeezing its sponsors for more money and will be quick to retool itself before the new season, with nary a backward glance. "I've never been comfortable talking about what we've achieved in the past," says Dennis. But can McLaren zoom fast enough into F1's future?
During Hakkinen's test run before the Italian Grand Prix, the McLaren crew follows the progress of his MP4-15 on TV screens in the team's Autodromo garage. Revving to 17,000 rpm, the car reaches nearly 200 mph on a back straightaway. The battle stations glow a healthy green - red readouts mean bad news - as the Finn's car, carrying more than 120 sensors, relays 3-Mbyte chunks of information via telemetry to the pit, delivering data on everything from brake temperature to oil pressure. When Hakkinen posts the fastest practice lap so far, the engineers give each other congratulatory backslaps.
Formula One cars, with some 9,000 components, are daunting works in progress, so the pit crew deserves a moment to gloat. Unlike the cookie-cutter vehicles usually driven around ovals in America's popular Nascar and CART races, every F1 car is custom-made and must be designed for both high speeds and hairpin handling. In the two weeks between contests, McLaren crews are likely to do more than just tinker with Hakkinen's ride: They often perform surgery, if only to shave off a few grams of weight or cut a hundredth of a second from each lap. "There's no such thing as a perfect car, we'll never reach that," a McLaren engineer tells me after the race. "Every time the car goes out, it's different."
Seconds later, Hakkinen pulls in and cuts the engine. I turn to Schattling. So what's new under the hood? I ask.
"There are two secrets - the horsepower and our budget," he says. I look at a stack of tires and ask him if any particular type will be used during the race. He shrugs: tire secrets. Apparently, everything's a secret. The aerodynamic wings on Hakkinen's MP4-15 are quickly covered up, and big vertical screens are placed across the driveway so people can't peer in.
That's the way it is with F1 - like dealing with the Pentagon. I'm not even supposed to be in here. I passed through three security checkpoints just to reach the outside of McLaren's pit garage. Then, only because I hounded Schattling, I was allowed into an area that most journalists never see.
Growing fidgety about my questions, Schattling decides to give me the boot. I'm ushered right past Hakkinen, a two-time world champion who, in F1-crazed countries like Italy, France, and Germany, is every bit as famous as Michael Jordan. His handlers force reporters to wait months for five-minute interviews. I get the feeling that if I so much as say hello to him I'll be gang-tackled.
"It's a very intense competition," Schattling says, pressing down on the latch. "We can't give away too much." The door closes tightly behind me. Nice chatting with you, too.
A control-freak style is nothing new to auto racing. Nearly a century ago, when the first spoke-wheeled race cars were steered down Europe's public dirt roads by men in floppy hats, organizers tried to get a handle on the wide variety of engines and vehicle sizes by establishing particular "formulas," or rules and restrictions on design and engineering. By 1934, for example, with the cars reaching dangerous speeds of 150 miles per hour, it was proposed that a weight limit of 750 kilograms (1,653 pounds) would decrease engine size and capability. In the late '40s the sport's governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, or the FIA, formally recognized the need to distinguish the most powerful and technologically advanced cars from the rest of the field, and the designation "Formula One" was established. Modern Formula One cars all have V-10 engines with somewhere around 800 horsepower. Weight standards are now aimed at keeping cars from being too light - the minimum is 600 kilograms (1,323 pounds), including the driver and a full fuel tank. Teams constantly work to pare down parts and then add the saved weight to the bottom of the chassis, with the goal of lowering a vehicle's center of gravity.
About the time Formula One came into its own, Ron Dennis was born in Woking, 27 miles southwest of London. When he was a kid he bred rabbits and cleaned cars. With his interest in fast objects intensifying, he left school early and became an F1 mechanic. But Dennis hated getting his clothes dirty, so he worked to become a Formula One team leader.
As a rookie boss for McLaren in 1981, Dennis helped revolutionize F1 when he and designer John Barnard rolled out the McLaren MP4, a car featuring the first carbon-fiber chassis. They came up with a structure of woven, baked, and resin-covered fibers that could be shaped into intricate, efficient forms - forms that would have compromised the strength of metal alloys.
"Carbon fiber had been used successfully in the aerospace industry," says Dennis. "Compared with metal, it was advantageous - five times as stiff as steel and up to four times as strong. It was the way forward."
Competitors soon followed suit, but Dennis kept surging ahead of them. In 1982, with sponsorship money from the TAG Group - Techniques d'Avant Garde, a privately held business empire run by a Saudi Arabian industrialist who remains a silent partner - Dennis hired Porsche to build cutting-edge engines for his McLarens. The Porsche turbos helped him win three world championships in the '80s. Part of the power plant's magic was that it incorporated sophisticated fuel-controlling electronics that helped trigger a digital takeover of the sport.
Today's Formula One cars would fit right in at Comdex. Under a 71-inch-wide, carbon-fiber roof lies a monster machine that has been designed, stressed, and even test-driven by computer. Snaking around the chassis, nearly a mile of wiring serves as the circulatory system for the chips, sensors, dashboard, and telemetry transmitter. The car's onboard brain is an electronic black box holding 500,000 lines of code that control the motor and gearbox and took an estimated 20 man-years to write.
Technology is such a big factor in F1 - more so than in any other sport - that there's a constant push-pull between what the engineers can do and what they're allowed to do. In the early '90s, for instance, the FIA outlawed two-way telemetry - which had the potential to let pit crews remotely and instantly alter suspension and engine traits - because officials worried that F1 was on the verge of becoming a race-by-joystick affair.
To make sure they don't become superfluous, drivers work hard at keeping up with F1's digital innovations. Bravery and quick reactions still count for a lot, but now these men (only a handful of women have competed, the last qualifying some 25 years ago) perform like high-speed processors, poring over reams of telemetry data in the pits to see where they might shave a millisecond around a curve or brake an instant later. They tune their bodies with massages, jock food, and workouts under the guidance of personal trainers.
Even so, some people complain that all the technology has turned a once-swashbuckling sport into little more than an information age arms race. "You've got push-button shifting, and there's no clutch," says Roger Bailey, CEO of Indy Lights, a minor-league US racing circuit, and an engine builder and team manager for Ferrari and McLaren during the '60s and '70s. "The art of motor racing? Those days are long gone. Formula One is a science."
Dennis sees the evolution differently. To stay where you are in Formula One, he says, is the same as going in reverse. "If you tried to do a startup company in Silicon Valley with all the same values and objectives that equaled success 10 years ago, you would fold. The formula for success comes from changes. It doesn't matter whether it's a technological or business objective you're trying to fulfill."
In Formula One, technology is the business. After the sport languished for decades with a reputation for unsafe cars and poor organization, F1's innovations and TV coverage blossomed simultaneously in the '80s. Today, F1's high speeds and cutting-edge equipment play live on five continents and before approximately 300 million television viewers per race. In 2000, Formula One debuted at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway - its first US stop in nearly a decade. Sponsors, keen on being associated with such fast-moving innovation, shell out millions to paste their logos on a chassis.
"Formula One isn't a bunch of guys dragging their knuckles on the ground," says Steve Potter, a supervisor for Mercedes-Benz USA sports marketing. "It's sophisticated auto racing." It's also highly effective advertising. Consumer-car sales have doubled during Mercedes' five-year association with McLaren. The percentage of Benzes leaving showrooms in silver - the color of the race cars - has boomed.
Meanwhile, the sport's coffers have swelled to $400 million in annual television revenues, with nearly a $3 billion bottom line. (Among American sports, only the NFL grosses more.) But these figures are only estimates: Nobody knows for certain what the profit margins are, because F1's finances, like everything else about it, are top secret. McLaren is a private company that doesn't open its books, and the FIA as a whole is equally tight-lipped. Bernie Ecclestone, the FIA's 70-year-old autocrat, is a famous recluse who is currently the subject of a European antitrust investigation for monopolizing the sport's TV and commercial rights. Last year Ecclestone cashed in some chips, selling half his F1-related assets to a German media company for about $1 billion. He loathes the press and seems convinced - justifiably - that F1's built-in popularity erases the need for any high-level glad-handing. Sylvester Stallone's upcoming movie, Driven, was supposed to be about Formula One, but because Ecclestone stiff-armed Sly's request for access, the movie will be based on CART racing instead.
Compared with Ecclestone, Ron Dennis is a welcoming presence - which isn't to say he's easygoing. The morning of the Monza race, I visit him in a neat, two-story, custom-built trailer known as Ron's World. The 46-foot structure is set up near the pit garages and walled off from the race-going masses in a paddock where all 11 teams park their glistening campers and semis.
With a kitchen, plenty of gizmos, and a pop-up satellite dish, Ron's World is a portable technofort that reflects his way of doing things. "Apart from the statement that this makes in respect to always striving for perfection, it actually has tremendous functionality," he says as we settle in around a glass table in his upstairs office. "But we're in the process of designing something a little better."
Dennis has a balding head and angular features that look like they were shaped in a wind tunnel. He glances between window blinds; below, workers hurriedly push hand trucks loaded with tires toward the pits. During this morning's 30-minute warm-up, David Coulthard, McLaren's other driver (every team enters two cars per race), had spun his MP4-15 on the track, an indication that something might be terribly wrong with the car. But Dennis is calm: He works at being highly efficient with his thoughts and time, calling displays of emotion "nonproductive."
"We're scrutinizing the problem at the moment. The car wasn't damaged," he says, looking away from the window. "We'll analyze and dissect the package, identify what is wrong, what is weak, and work hard on the weaknesses." With race time drawing near, he gets up and walks toward the top of a spiral staircase. I wish him luck.
Dennis turns around. "Luck has nothing to do with it," he says flatly. "Relying on luck means you're unprepared."
I've watched plenty of Formula One on TV, but not in person, so it's time to see what all the fuss is about. I leave the McLaren paddock and stride into the reaches of the Autodromo, Italy's 78-year-old shrine to speed.
It seems bizarre that the track is nestled inside the Parco di Monza - think Nascar among the California redwoods. But the idea of internal-combustion engines wailing past trees is completely normal to Europeans. Racing has been in their blood for more than a century, and over here, Formula One isn't just a sport - it's a major part of the continent's technopop culture.
More than 100,000 international fans crowd every nook of the track, an expansive dogleg oval with some nasty bends thrown in. The hardcore types are wearing face paint. Women in heels walk toward VIP clubs. Stat freaks scan newspapers for yesterday's lap times.
But mostly the grounds are swarming with Italians wearing Ferrari's signature red and black. The tifosi, or Ferrari fans, are blasting handheld air horns and waving flags emblazoned with Ferrari's prancing-horse logo.
I cross the park to reach another straightaway, navigating an exotic-car expo full of Lamborghinis and Jaguars. I buy a prosciutto-and-tomato sandwich and walk up to a vendor selling drinks. "Deux bières," a guy in front of me says in a bad French accent.
The vendor pauses and looks up quizzically.
"Well, I'd be OK in France," the customer says with a throaty laugh and a British accent. He's wearing a Team West McLaren Mercedes baseball cap. "This is the first F1 race I've been to abroad," he says, and introduces himself as Dave Hammond. He and his friend Steve Gore, both of them middle-aged Brits from the town of Grimsby, in northeastern England, have found a spot close to the track, and I sit down with them. They've traveled 26 hours by bus to see the race.
"I've done the British Grand Prix for the last four years," says Hammond, taking a slug of his Foster's. They're McLaren fans. It's a UK company, after all, and David Coulthard is Scottish. "It's the bozz," Hammond continues, and now I don't understand him. Then it comes to me: the buzz.
"Everybody is here for the same reasons," he says. "The noise, the speed, the weather, the technology." Back in Grimsby, Hammond is a mechanic, and he says going to a Formula One race is like looking into a crystal ball. Over the years, turbocharging, sophisticated valve trains, and advanced tire technologies have all made their way from racing to passenger cars. "Ten years down the line we get to work on what we're seeing this afternoon," Hammond says. He leans back on the grass and grins. "It's just a bozz."
Thanks to some slack security around one team's pit garage (never mind which one), I manage to sneak to a press photographers' perch beside the track's first chicane, or set of tight turns. The start of the Italian Grand Prix is only minutes away.
Honks fill the air, and an enormous Ferrari flag is unfurled over 20 rows of grandstand. The F1 cars - 21st-century robo-billboards with angry snouts - are about to give the crowd its long-anticipated speed fix.
Inside their revving cars, two abreast and in 11 rows, the drivers wait for the red lights to blink out so they can floor it. Hakkinen is starting on the second row, Coulthard a row further back. McLaren's ace finished yesterday's qualifying session two-tenths of a second slower than Ferrari's Schumacher and his Brazilian teammate, Rubens Barrichello. In a prerace press conference, Hakkinen grumbled about the MP4-15's handling.
To a race-car engineer, this complaint is equivalent to a doctor hearing "It hurts everywhere." The telemetry data might give the engineers solid proof that one "setup" - a dizzying number of variables that include a car's ride-height, the angles of its chassis wings, even the state of its tires - helped a driver reach his fastest practice times. But a driver's on-track impressions may lead to suggestions that make the car faster still. Hakkinen decided there was a bug somewhere in the system, and the engineers had 24 hours to suss it out.
Now it's time to find out if they succeeded. The lights go off, and there's a crazy, swerving rush down the main straight. Because passing midrace is difficult in a sport of slim advantages (the top 20 Monza qualifiers posted times that were within a 2-second window), everyone immediately jockeys to squirt past the competition. Hakkinen gets off to a thunderous start that should allay a few McLaren worries. Before the first chicane, he blows past Barrichello. Slowing to make the first turn, his composite brake rotors glowing like embers, Hakkinen's silver-and-black McLaren car is just behind Schumacher's red Ferrari.
I'm right in front of the action, and my body is getting the full dose of Formula One. Twenty-two engines wind out like enormous electric drills; my chest trembles as a carbon-fiber freight train harnessing about 18,000 horsepower thunders by. The Brits were right: Formula One is a bozz.
But then things turn nasty. Heinz-Harald Frentzen, a driver for Jordan, doesn't brake quickly enough for the second chicane. He rear-ends Barrichello, whose skidding, disabled car takes out Coulthard. With tire smoke and space-age shrapnel clouding the view, Pedro de la Rosa's Arrows car runs up the back of a Jaguar and is launched into a series of hideous rolls. Wriggling out of the remains of his upside-down chassis, de la Rosa somehow emerges unhurt. But a wheel that shoots off his car doesn't stop until it mortally wounds a track marshal.
As cranes and emergency vehicles rush to the site, fans - sitting in the stands, hanging off fences - lay off their horns. A helicopter camera broadcasting on giant, trackside TV monitors catches a glimpse of doctors pounding on the marshal's chest in a vain attempt to save him.
Yellow caution flags are waved throughout the next 10 laps, and the racers, led by Schumacher and then Hakkinen, are forced to crawl behind a pace car. The race eventually resumes full speed, but it's obvious that the Finn's MP4-15 isn't dialed in. To the thrill of the tifosi, Hakkinen is uncharacteristically giving up time to Schumacher on nearly every stretch of track. Then he enters the pits on lap 42, and his car is transformed.
"We didn't run the right tire pressures," a McLaren engineer tells me later, noting that even half a pound of inflation makes a huge difference. "We got the setup wrong."
Hakkinen's crew makes the adjustments to his new tires, and he closes on the leader. But it's too late. After 53 laps, Schumacher bolts past the checkered flag first.
When the last car pits, the tifosi storm the main straightaway. Smoke bombs turn the blue sky red. Celebrators kiss the pavement, and a cluster of McLaren computers get sprayed with something bubbly. It's all Dennis' men can do to quickly pack up the electronics and get the hell out of there.
A pound of tire pressure: That's just one burst of air from an ordinary service-station compressor. But win-or-bust F1 techies know that these slim margins of error can make the difference, and that they can and must anticipate them before a car even touches a track.
The day after the Italian Grand Prix, I fly from Italy to Stuttgart, in southwestern Germany, to see a place where such calculations are made. Stuttgart is a company town: High above the city's green valley floor and atop a tall office building sits the biggest Mercedes-Benz hood ornament I've ever seen.
I'm taken to one of DaimlerChrysler's multiple facilities, close to where Gottlieb Daimler helped cobble together one of the first gas-powered cars in 1886. After entering a faceless brick structure that's known as Building 143, I see a door with a sign that warns: ZUTRITT FÜR UNBEFUGTE VERBOTEN! (Loose translation: "Get lost!") It's opened for me by Hans-Peter Kollmeier, the head of the Engine and Powertrain department at Mercedes-Benz Motorsport.
Kollmeier leads me to the middle of a fluorescent-lit room that's lined with computer hardware. A big window looks onto another room housing an enormous, boxy contraption that sits amid a tangle of wires and hoses. It's called a transient dynamometer, and it's worth more than a million dollars. Kollmeier says this device works with software to test the capabilities of an engine and gearbox. "Here you can do everything that's happening in the car," he says, gesturing toward the idle machine. "You can simulate a complete speed race."
With his staff of 30, the scruffy-bearded, 46-year-old Kollmeier is responsible for taking McLaren's Mercedes-Benz power plants on virtual drives, which is just one way that F1 teams are embracing computer simulation. The transient dyno can continuously alter the loads put on a motor and transmission, evaluating their performance and durability on whatever computer-created hurdles Kollmeier sends their way.
For instance, the next Grand Prix after Monza - which happens to be the inaugural F1 event at Indianapolis - will be run on a new 2.6-mile course. The grassy infield has been tattooed with a 10-turn serpentine that connects to approximately half of Indy's famous oval. Using data provided by American track engineers, McLaren's software writers built a 3-D, digital replica of the course. The V-10 engine was then hooked up to the transient dyno and "driven." And driven. The engine accelerated and decelerated thousands of times on the course, as if Hakkinen himself were putting the machine through its paces.
"What we're doing here," says Kollmeier as he walks past the computers with a small entourage of staffers in tow, "is learning, with complex technology, how to improve the racing possibilities." From such work, Kollmeier's crew is able to determine what realistic speeds and lap times might be expected during the US Grand Prix - important information for a team rolling into Indy, sight unseen.
"Nobody raced that track before in that configuration. We did!" another engineer brags. I ask him his name, but he looks at Kollmeier, who shakes his head. Hard-working geeks are a much-sought-after commodity in Formula One. Kollmeier doesn't even want this guy's identity in print.
Back in Woking, McLaren puts tremendous energy into other forms of simulation. The company tests the aerodynamic efficiency of its body parts and chassis in wind tunnels and by using computational fluid dynamics, or CFD, software programs. For Indianapolis, about 15 different approaches to "downforce" are being tried out onscreen to get the best blend of cornering ability (created by angling the chassis wings to scoop the wind) and speed (angling the wings to cheat the wind). McLaren's engineers also test parts by plugging them into a computer-generated race car.
Kollmeier leads me into the dyno room, which looks like a Jiffy Lube for mad scientists. Two huge, gray metal boxes house electrical motors that work with the computers to vary loads. There's also a gigantic swing-arm, pipes running underneath the metal floor, and anodized red wrenches.
My host apologizes that, due to a scheduling hiccup, there's no engine to run, but undoubtedly there will be more tests soon. Team West McLaren Mercedes depends on the transient dyno, right up to race time.
Last year, for instance, the squad was having a problem with the electrohydraulic gear-shifting system on a Friday before a Sunday Grand Prix. Engineers noticed that the shifting was off by milliseconds, which could shred a transmission during competition. Looking for help, McLaren sent the errant tranny data to Building 143.
"We did a lot of work here at the dyno," says Kollmeier, giving the cold machine a gentle stroke. "By Saturday morning we'd sent the track engineers optimized values to feed into their software. They ran them in the car for qualifying, and then at the race."
Technicians on either side of the boss smile.
"Problem solved," says Kollmeier.
At Ron Dennis' urging, I visit the TAG McLaren Group's headquarters in Woking to get a better appreciation of the engineering behind a Formula One car. The command post is an ominous, 20,000-square-foot, blocklike structure, accented with silver slats running across smoked-glass windows. It's as welcoming as the Death Star.
To Martin Whitmarsh, the racing team's managing director, the analogy fits, because he sees Formula One as combat. From a desk in his stark office, the buzz-haired Whitmarsh explains the pressure surrounding the year-in, year-out effort to design and build an ever-faster car. "You have to develop this vehicle in a very short period of time. Then this sophisticated new product goes to market. Goes to war"
F1 competition is like perpetual D day for vehicle engineers. A virtually new chassis and a modified engine have to be produced between the end of one season and the following January, to allow time for track and computer work before racing starts again in March. Some 2,000 chassis parts get redesigned through the course of a campaign, under two-week deadlines that are nonnegotiable. F1 engineering jobs ruin marriages. Whitmarsh, a McLaren commander of 12 years and former aerospace contractor, sounds like General George Patton when he talks about the demands placed on his men. "Whatever it costs to win the race," he explains, "we're going to do."
That said, it's easy to see why McLaren HQ is also a breeding ground for various F1 techno-upticks of such impact that they'll provide important time gains on the track. "A second per lap!" Whitmarsh exclaims with a crazed look.
One such undertaking slammed the competition back in 1993. After months of development, McLaren introduced a programmable electrohydraulic power-braking system that stopped its vehicles more quickly, allowing Dennis' drivers to maintain their speed for slivers of time longer before braking in the turns. Now Whitmarsh tells me about another secret weapon: a new McLaren differential, three years in the making, that can selectively feed more torque to individual rear wheels for superior grip through the turns.
But there are more rules in Formula One than there are on a battlefield, and currently McLaren doesn't have either weapon in its arsenal - they're both banned.
Through the years, many F1 advancements have been outlawed or stillborn as the FIA attempts to rein in the engineers. Take turbocharging, which emerged in the '80s: Back then, every team added turbines to their engines, which rammed gobs of air through the motors to boost performance. The FIA, however, feared that the 1,200-horsepower engines might start turning lead-footed drivers into wall splatter, and by 1988 the turbos were gone. Such restrictions are enough to frustrate a hard-working engineer who's just trying to do his job.
"I've been in F1 for 13 years, and half my time has been spent on things that are now illegal," one of McLaren's lead engineers, Patrick Lowe, would later explain over the phone. "It's disappointing."
Rumors abound that some engineers simply don't take no for an answer. The scofflaw technology of choice is traction-controlling code written into the engine-management software: This programming wrinkle stops the cars' wheels from spinning out and ensures lightning-fast starts. To fight back, FIA officials put locks and seals on the teams' black boxes. Vehicles are systematically "scrutineered" by computer - the F1 equivalent of Olympic urine samples - with middling success.
Most F1 observers believe McLaren has stayed above such high tech trickery. But the restrictions don't stop Whitmarsh from urging guys like Lowe to search for loopholes. Even if a gizmo has a short working life - the power-braking system was banned after three events, McLaren winning two of them - the points it helps accumulate might be enough to decide a world championship.
"I've always said one thing to our engineers," Whitmarsh explains in a booming voice. "When the FIA stops picking on us is when we're not winning the races."
He marches out of his office to talk tire construction with Bridgestone's technical director, and I'm taken to McLaren's immaculate shop floor. Uniformed men work dutifully to execute the sequestered engineers' wishes. Sheets of carbon fiber are being cut to hand-make parts like brake discs and wings. A titanium accelerator pedal has been laboriously sculpted until it weighs a negligible 124 grams.
I'm led to the low-slung chassis of Hakkinen's car, which took 1,200 man-hours to create, and it looks different to me than it did in Monza - more sculpture than machine. The artfully shaped rear diffuser, which funnels exhaust to enhance the car's aerodynamics; the ergonomic arrangement of push buttons and paddles on the $60,000, carbon-fiber steering wheel; the crafted, shining, 24-carat gold-leaf insulation that lines the engine compartment - all these things were brought to life by human inspiration and labor. Formula One is a science all right, but behind good science is sweat and blood. The MP4-15 isn't a car. It's a rolling memorial to engineering battles.
In the weeks preceding September's US Grand Prix, workers at Ilmor Engineering, the Brixworth, England-based company that builds Mercedes-Benz racing engines, double- and triple-check their work.
Among the thousands of engine parts, bolts are inspected to guarantee that tolerances fall within fractions of the diameter of a human hair. Additional dyno runs are conducted, and 10 or so power plants are packed for the trip to Indianapolis. Each car gets a fresh engine for Friday practice, Saturday qualifying, and Sunday racing. A few spares are tossed in for good measure.
These procedures are pretty standard before an F1 race, although this time around the techies might be paying closer attention. The new Indy course has a relatively straight, 1.05-mile stretch that, according to the computer simulations, represents a 23-second window for maxing out the power. No other Formula One course is so stressful on an engine. "I think this is going to be our worst case, if you like," Simon Armstrong, Ilmor's F1 project manager, tells me before the race.
The folks putting on the US Grand Prix want to make sure everyone else finds the Indianapolis Motor Speedway quite hospitable. So Speedway president Tony George has satisfied all the nitpicky demands that kept Bernie Ecclestone and his organization away from the US since 1991: George has spent two years and $50 million constructing new pits, putting in luxury boxes, and installing the twisty stretch of track. He has made sure the temperature in the new media room stays between an FIA-required 64.4 and 68 degrees.
The warm welcome helps persuade Ecclestone, the sport's mop-haired Napoleon, to attend an Indianapolis press conference. But it doesn't take many questions to annoy him. Asked by a reporter how much the winning driver typically makes at Grand Prix events, his lips twist and he says: "Funny thing, because I was going to ask all of our friends here what their salaries are. It's just as interesting for me to know these things as it is for you to know what Schumacher earns.''
But Formula One drivers are grateful anyone in America cares enough to inquire. In the US, F1 is still overshadowed by fender-bending Nascar events. In every other country that hosts the sport, top drivers are mobbed in public, hounded by the press, and treated like heroes - which, in a way, they are. From a semireclined position, a driver coolly pilots a 220-mph carbon-fiber tub only inches from the ground and the competition. His neck has become disproportionately thick: Under 5 g's of hard cornering, his helmeted head tends to sway like a 50-pound watermelon. The encroachment by technology actually makes a driving job in F1 harder than any other in motorsports, because racers have to quickly adapt to a constant wave of changes. An F1 driver's focus is said to be superhuman - equal to that of a 100-meter sprinter's. But the F1's track athletes have to maintain their focus for 190 miles.
"Otherwise, you leave your brain behind," says Mauricio Gugelmin, a CART racer and former F1 competitor who survived a spectacular, rolling crash at a 1989 Grand Prix. "In a Formula One environment, you're a little bit like a robot."
The most famous cyborg on the grid might be Schumacher, the Ferrari star and two-time champion who reportedly makes $35 million annually and is impervious to pressure. But McLaren's Hakkinen seems nearly as clinical, and last year he pulled off one of the sport's all-time steely moves: To win the Belgian Grand Prix, he simultaneously shot past two competitors - including a surprised Schumacher, who had been in the lead. Most drivers struggle to get around one car. Unfortunately, the 5' 10" Hakkinen isn't as colorful off the track. At victory celebrations, he pumps his arms mechanically, like a McLaren gizmo that didn't get enough oil, and his press conference answers sound as somber as Gregorian chants.
So there isn't much expectation for high times when the "Flying Finn" steps into a small, Indianapolis hotel conference room to meet the press and brass from team sponsor TAG Heuer. He's dressed in a driver's suit, and his blue eyes are bloodshot.
"It's difficult to have to learn a new course," Hakkinen says with a halting Scandinavian accent. He sits at a small table with a glass of water. "Miserable."
But then he loosens up. He jokes about race strategy. "The sound is very loud on the track. That's why I like staying in front," he explains with a grin.
One of TAG's flacks walks over and shows the celeb a picture of the company's newest watch, which incorporates race-car-ready titanium and carbon fiber. "We're giving you one," she says.
Cameras are readied for a photo op.
"I already have one," replies Hakkinen, peering at the image. The PR woman's face grows long. Hakkinen senses his misfire.
"I'll take another," he says in his best Terminator voice. The flack smiles.
A driver's gotta keep up appearances.
Race day dawns 57 degrees and damp in central Indiana. Undaunted by the drizzle, one of the largest audiences in F1 history ambles through the Speedway gates. From the looks of the flag-waving, 225,000-strong crowd, F1-at-Indy seems like a concept that might stick.
Hakkinen, having qualified third-fastest, is in the second row behind Schumacher. With air horns blaring, the drivers rocket forward. It doesn't take long for the German and the Finn to emerge.
Within laps of each other, the two leaders adjust to a drying track by swapping grooved, wet-weather tires for grippier semislicks. Out of the pits, Hakkinen falls behind by briefly getting stuck in slower traffic. When he finally finds empty stretches of pavement and ups his pace, it's obvious that Hakkinen's engineers nailed the wing profiles. The MP4-15 is wedgelike enough to produce stability-inducing downforce through the infield turns, but the wings aren't scooping so much air that Hakkinen is losing ground to Schumacher on the straightaways.
Then the Finn starts gaining. On lap 22 he's more than a second quicker than Schumacher. By lap 24 Schumacher's lead is 5.5 seconds; soon after that it shrinks to 4.1.
But at that point, one of the McLaren battle stations glows red with terrible news. Nearing the end of lap 26, the left rear of Hakkinen's MP4-15 has erupted in flames. He pulls to the inside of the track and quickly pushes himself out of the car. His race is over, and when Schumacher cruises to victory, McLaren's hopes for another Drivers' World Championship dwindle. With two races to go, the German has a sizable lead.
Ilmor's engineers later deduced that a 1-inch hole had been punched clean through the side of the engine by a broken part. Oil poured onto the 1,600-degree exhaust pipe, and the rear end ignited.
Did Indy's demanding layout cause the failure? Ilmor's Armstrong couldn't say. Nor could he say why the part failed this time but hadn't failed before. "That it happened is not adequate," he told me. "What defines a good one versus a bad one is unclear."
Bottom line: Even F1 engineers don't have all the answers.
Ten days later, I'm on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain in Vermont, getting a different perspective on how the McLaren team plans on racing ahead of the field.
Standing in a resort parking lot, a shiny new Mercedes pulls up next to me, and Bernie Glaser, a clean-cut, Mercedes-Benz USA product manager, is at the wheel. He motions for me to hop in next to him, then puts the car into gear. "In pure technology, this is the latest available," he explains as we start building speed down a country road. "Our suspension is an active body control system," he calmly continues as he whips the $114,000 vehicle through a curve at 80 mph. The posted sign recommends 40. "Ferraris come with traditional steel springs."
The folks at Mercedes invited me to New England to show off the latest advancements in their top-end production models, and the vehicle's handling is truly impressive. The "active body control" is a two-computer, 13-sensor package that processes data inputs from the suspension every 10 milliseconds. The car refuses to pitch in the turns, making it harder to screw up behind the wheel. Less-refined predecessors were once found on F1 cars.
"When the SLR comes," says Glaser, who's gunning the V-12 engine, "we could do all this driving and a little bit more in half the time."
The SLR, a coupe that looks like a Titan missile with big tires and doors that hinge skyward, will represent the ultimate in trickle-down racing technology. Available in 2003, it will be the most advanced Mercedes-Benz ever sold to the public, boasting 544 horsepower, ceramic brakes that use computers to render the spinout obsolete, and a body built largely of F1-issue carbon fiber. The best company to produce such a car for the people? McLaren.
"One of the great successes for McLaren is that it has elevated its stature from Formula One team to high tech manufacturer," says Doug Nye, an auto-racing historian. "We're not talking about building tin lizzies here, but the most charismatic section of the Mercedes-Benz lineup."
The SLR's carbon-fiber shell will be 40 percent lighter than a steel body, and at least as crashworthy. With the Mercedes projected to cost about $300,000, McLaren's technology won't be accessible to everyday commuters. Yet. But fuel injection and antilock braking were once exclusive to upscale cars. It's only a matter of time before shoppers are poking their noses into McLaren-inspired Nissans with carbon-fiber chassis.
McLaren will further explore the future of motor vehicles on the grassy site of an old Woking ostrich farm, the shiny cars spewing out of a facility that is estimated to cost $300 million and that, in preliminary overhead drawings, looks like a giant brain. The building will stand beside two manmade lakes and be big enough to fit nine 747s wing to wing. There will also be a wind tunnel, a McLaren museum of technology, and a landscaped park. Called Paragon and made with plenty of carbon fiber, it will be another manifestation of Dennis' idea that absolute perfection can be found in what man engineers, designs, and builds.
"Paragon will set a new world standard for the workplace," he assures.
Dennis' staff had better walk into the place ready to go. Once the headquarters are finished in 2002, McLaren will start producing 500 SLRs annually. DaimlerChrysler believes that the first two years' worth of cars, about half of which are earmarked for the US, will quickly sell out.
Long before there's a composite car in every driveway, Dennis sees the SLR making a different kind of impact. He plans on convincing car nuts that there can be more than one manufacturer whose name is synonymous with engineering exotic machinery. A prime competitor of his new creation is the 550 Maranello, a 199-mph, 12-cylinder bullet built by, yup, Ferrari.
"In acceleration, cornering, deceleration, curb weight - all the important aspects of a sports car," says Dennis, "we have to surpass that vehicle."
The pursuit of a Drivers' World Championship ends in early October in Suzuka, Japan. Schumacher edges Hakkinen by 1.8 seconds to give Ferrari its first title in 21 years. A McLaren engineer later tells me that Hakkinen's race went exactly as planned; on that day, Ferrari's simply went better. When I catch Dennis on the phone several weeks later, the 2000 season is over, but he doesn't seem sad so much as consumed.
"You have three minutes," he snaps.
"What happened?"
"The finishing record of our cars was superb," he says. "They raised the game."
By the time we speak, the 10-month-old MP4-15 has already been scrapped, and its successor, which Dennis hopes will beat this year's red car from Ferrari, is well past an embryonic stage. About 1,800 of the MP4-16's 3,000 redesigned chassis parts have been drawn up. With the debut of Michelin tires this coming season, McLaren, which has decided to stay with Bridgestone, is working with the manufacturer to make rubber compounds that blend more of that elusive triumvirate of traction, speed, and durability, and figuring out how to incorporate the rethought tires into the tricky setup of a new car. The technology race is already going full blast.
"Next season there will be less room for error," says Dennis with a tinge of anticipation in his voice. Then he hangs up.
The same day, word leaks into the press that the FIA, losing a battle in the war against traction control, is considering legalizing the software early in the 2001 season. The potential decision - to be voted on this month - immediately has the drivers grumbling about electronics taking over the role of a sensitive right foot when it comes to preventing wheel spin at the start and through the turns. But for the engineers it's confirmation of their ever-present influence on the sport. They are truly Formula One copilots.
"When those cars go around the racetrack it's the ultimate data run," McLaren's Patrick Lowe tells me. "The car is there on the telly on Sunday, running a bit of software that's been written that week. You're watching that car, and you can say, 'I know that piece of software. I know it!'"
