wow

I think I’m going to need to call in some expert help for this one [Music]

today I’m looking at the McLaren mp44 arguably the most successful Formula One

car in history driven by both airton Center and Alan Prost it won 15 of the

16 races it entered and achieved a one-two Podium an incredible 10 times last year I sat down with the chief

designer Steve Nichols to talk about his career and the Genesis of this car but today we’ve got something really special

in store you see most Formula One cars you only get to see twice once on the Telly or if you’re lucky in person but

at a great distance then a few years later in a museum where really it could be a show car thanks to an incredibly

kind owner of one of just six chassis in the entire world and the team at Key glow spaces today I can show you this

car in a way that very few have seen it we have three of the original 1988

McLaren team Steve Nichols the chief designer Matthew Jeffries Project Lead for Monaco and front suspension and Neil

trundle Chief mechanic for the 88 and 89 season these gentlemen have come here not just to share their memories of the

creation and campaign of this car but also to help me take it apart and talk you through what was in 1988 one of the

most advanced and closely guarded cars in the world a particular thank you must

also be given to Matthew who was instrumental in not just the creation of this car but also this video if you are

a fan of classic Formula One and on the hunt for a gift for yourself or others I can highly recommend one of his limited

edition artworks created in exacting detail these are accurate scale representations of some of history’s

most successful races as a special thank you from us to viewers of the channel he is offering a discount across most of

the range including some very limited edition prints signed by some of the team members and even drivers of the

cars depicted just to wait your appetite further there are 30 examples of this beautiful print of chassis number five

and they have been signed by the three gentlemen behind and beside me well this

is a bit special this is the 88 15 out of 16 winning car and it’s very special to be here and see

it and be a part of this production this was the the car that Santa drove in

Brazil and it was a fraught time to get it there in fact this chassis arrived this

was the spare car arrived in pieces we’d worked day and night to get there it was

all a bit late but there was nothing unusual um I think we were confident because the car was quick in testing but only we

knew just how quick it was I think so we arrived in Brazil mechanics started to assemble the spare

car two cars were more or less complete the center and the proscar this is chassis 3 which was in pieces a lot of

work day and night uh late nights to arrive at qualifying but we were

confident and we we were up for it we’ve got to remember that at the same time as us having the

Honda engine this was our first year of the Honda engine Lotus also had the same engine Williams had had a similar engine

the year before but we had Santa and frost probably the two best drivers in the world at the

time and we were going to do it so we came to first practice by then we had three cars

in those days you had two race cars and you had a tea car sitting there

ready to go the rules were during that season between the two drivers that they

randomly selected so it was 16 Races they randomly selected which race they

had priority use of the Tikka I mean it was available for the other driver but they had prior call on it during

practice and often they would choose the spare car as their race car yeah this

was price car chassis III so they were running around in practice suddenly Pros came in the pits and the

whole nose assembly was dragging on the ground which was a bit of a shock we took the nose off and the nose box was also

hanging on the ground and what had happened was that the whole front bulkhead well the top part of the

bulkhead had become delaminated not from design there was an error back at the workshop

in the Panic there was an error in fit in the nose box and the bulkhead had been or the front of the car being filed

away to fit the nose and it took away the fur the outer layer of carbon and

the whole top of the front bulkhead peeled off and the nose was on the

ground that was a bit of an alarm call we looked at the other cars they weren’t as bad Pros took over

another chassis we did a repair on this we did a resin repair and we put some

reinforcing rods on this car I think we might have put it on the other cars as well just as to be doubly sure come the

race um they went round on the parade lap came to the grid and Switched Off the engines we went out

to the cars did a few little adjustments and then started them up for the lap to the grid

there was a countdown Santa was sitting there and as he put it in gear

suddenly he was waving his arms and what had happened was that been the gear shifted had lightning lightning hole up

the inside quite a big hole and it had been drilled too far and they at that point

it party company and he had no gear change so he was waving his arms Ron Dennis and

Barry Oldham ran out climbed over the barrier and tried to fix the car meanwhile all the engines are running

the starter is waiting to start the race and then the Marshall said leave it

you’ve got to get off so Ron and Barry jumped back over the car was wheeled away meanwhile yeah to ran to the pits

to get in the spare car the cars went off and Santa left at about 30 seconds

after the start within a few laps of course he was up at the back Marcos and he was climbing

through the field but they decided that he had started after the race had

officially started so they black flagged him which was a shame yeah that was a bit of a drama

um Frost won the race quite easily and uh that was one Brazilian homegrown

Prix that Santa missed he missed quite a few I think it wasn’t until 91 that he got his home Grand Prix win he was

devastated so did the crowd the car performed well the engine was fantastic

and uh yeah first of many okay well this is uh the mp44 from

1988 and if I could just tell you a little bit about the external features

and some of the differences between it and its predecessors the mp43 you can

see that the nose is a similar shape but just much narrower

the monocoque even from the beginning you can see is a is a square or shape

bigger sectional area so it’s uh it’s stiffer we had a rule then the driver’s

feet had to be behind the front axle it made the packaging at the front somewhat

difficult you’ve got to fit in the dampers and the driver’s feet and so the

the chassis tapers out and becomes bigger as it goes back so we we mounted

the dampers vertically in this area and and the pull Rod is angled back so we

had more room for the driver’s feet here and then slightly further back uh the dampers so the front wing on the

full fall was a slight deviation from the previous year because the main plane was actually one piece structure that

went through the nose box located it on Jaws which uh takes the the main plane

Aero load and drag such that the the resultant Vector went through the corner

of the jaw which gave it very good locations and stability and the nose box is carbon fiber which was the first

carbon fiber nose box McLaren did and we did that with the aid of a a 10 meter

drop tower which we built out of the back of the factory rather than an aluminum structure the carbon structure

was designed so that the energy was absorbed by the factory turning it to dust and the end plates of this

particular shape because the aerodynamicists found that it was it was a more effective shape than a than a

than a lower cut version um so that’s why they are as they are

here on the bottom edge of the of the end plates there’s what looks like a wooden strip and it is in fact a

laminated wooden strip called jabrock um with a Kevlar hinge in effect between

the the wooden strip and the the carbon fiber main structural part of the end

plate that was designed so that if it hit the curbs it had a degree of flexibility

in those days you’re not allowed to have aerodynamic movable aerodynamic devices of course but this was deemed such that

the it was just a stiffness issue and it was allowed the side pods were quite low

they’re pretty much identical to the side pods that we had on the MP4 three

the whole engine cover areas is a bit lower than the 4-3 the Honda engine was

more Compact and the fuel tank had gone down to 150 liters so the fuel tank was

smaller the engine was smaller and so the center part of the car is lower than the four three

we wanted to fit the driver into the same profile as the fuel tank in the

engine so the driver was we reclined a little bit more than on the on the 4-3

to get his shoulders down in in the same profile it’s the as the engine and the

fuel tank the so-called Coca-Cola shape was the same as on the 4-3 there’s a

it’s quite an Abrupt shape there and that was because there’s a

Turbocharger in there so we needed to have the Bodywork go around the turbocharger we could get away with

quite a sharp radius there because the tire forces the air to go inboard of the

tire and and then up the top surface of the diffuser and diverting that air

through there tends to fill the hole in the air behind the the car the rear

suspension quite similar to the four three it’s got a push Rod compared to

the pull rod on the front you can see a little duck there for the gearbox oil cooler rear wing is mounted to the

gearbox with these twin carbon plates to to support it the end plates quite big

quite rectangular we needed a degree of flexibility between the diffuser and the

end plates but we didn’t want them flapping around so there’s a tongue at the bottom of the end plate which fits

into a little slot on the on the diffuser which keeps the end

plate from flapping around too much but introduces a degree of

of flexibility between the end plate and the floor and then the exhaust

comes out either side into the diffuser area so that’s about it from what you

can see externally so Taz all the teams are running Goodyear tires

but it’s interesting to note that in this period qualifying was qualifying tires when we

talk about qualifying tires we mean tires that are super sticky uh a slow warm-up and

then one fast lap to the point where when they come in the

garage they are like glue we were talking earlier that until we

um got the trick of um unsticking them from the floor when the cars had come in until that point often they come in from

qualifying stop in the garage and generally the mechanics immediately lift

the front of the car up well we’ve got pull Rod suspension so if the tires are stuck to the garage

floor when you lift the car the pull Rod was put into compression and the thing would bend like a banana

and it would scrap the pull Rod so we’d have to change them we soon twigged that so we’d either put water on the floor or

we’d roll the car backwards and forwards to unstick them before we jack them up all teams had qualifying tires we had

different compounds of tires not like modern formula one where the Tire Choice is is restricted you could

run a mix of compounds if you wanted around the car for the race so we had this Polaroid suspension which

was Rising rate um which Steve introduced on this car

it was a great system worked very well um the brakes these are carbon brakes

and the carbon brakes have been around for a few years but these calipers we’d

had them at McLarens over a few years with our cars they were

designed and manufactured by McLaren for a few years we did our own design until

we got an outside Brake company to supply a caliber because of low engine deceleration because it’s a small turbo

engine I think Steven the designers decided that we needed two calipers on

each corner so we had eight calipers the brake Ducks they look very simple now

um but they work fine and you can control the the cooling of the ducts just simply by

taping you had to get it right for the race but we would adjust it by altering how much air went in there were no there

wasn’t a limit on the number of tires unlike now so um every session was a new set of tires

from Goodyear and of course in the race you you had the choice of how how many you could stop four times if you wanted

in the race but um and goodyears did a good job on the tires practice and

qualifying same set of brakes and then a fresh set of pads for the race same calipers

um suspension you know that did the whole weekend still um track rods very lightweight

um I think they could take a bit more impact than carbon ones now that’s my personal view so it’s worth looking at

the wheel nuts on this period of cars so compare with modern Formula One cars and

pit stops I mean we change tires during the race they’d seldom Go the whole race

so it was very simple it’s a hexagonal nut the wheel is located with pegs

but it’s a simple hexagonal nut so the mechanic has actually got to find the hex it’s also by regulation it has to

have a safety peg in case the wheel comes loose to stop the wheel not coming off so this is a process that the

mechanics very involved in nowadays as the car comes in they literally on and

off and the nut is retained in the wheel that’s going on so here the mechanic has

actually got a undo the tab gun it off gun them up on and put the peg back in

So inevitably it’s going to take longer but actually we could achieve

pit stops in it’s not the 2.2 seconds they do now I think our fastest was

in Spain I think we did a four or five second stop I mean the guys were

were good and fast but it’s a longer process same processors now really three on each

wheel a gun guy one taking a wheel off one putting the wheel on a front Jackman

and a rear Jackman and also what we call the lollipop man so this was generally

Ron Dennis who stood at the front with a lollipop and when he saw that all the wheels were on he released the car

probably a bit more reliable and nowadays goes wrong so very simple but it worked I have to say that the whole

car was easy to maintain the the design made them very user-friendly subsequent

races which generally had four cars so we’d had two race cars the regular teaker on the ground ready

to go and often we had a spare chassis in a box part assembled with all its wiring looms

no suspension for emergency three cars on the ground three mechanics on each car so you have

number one on each car and two number twos and they stayed with those cars

um we had the most fantastic crew in 88.

a hundred percent dedicated could go without sleep for two days if necessary

but they were brilliant mechanics in the evenings we’ll all go out together so three on

each car uh Mia’s Chief mechanic we had a guy

that looked after the tire Logistics a fuel guy

traveling fabricator to do any repairs that was about it we were a small team when you think about how it all comes to

be the design process you know first of all you you’ve got to consider the rules and the components that you have to work

with what engine you’re going to have people that you have to work with trying to apply all the brain power to the task

so it starts off just a thought process what do we want to do how can we build

the best possible car and from there you have some ideas and then maybe you do a

few sketches Matthew is very good at doing sort of 3D sketches of how things

could possibly be then you go into more detail with layouts you know laying out

the whole concept of the car on the drawing board and then you can carry on

from that to start doing all the detailed design I often wonder if that wasn’t a mistake should we have

proceeded further down the design path with the with the tag Turbo Porsche

engine but in the end I suppose it was right to wait and so that we could have a better complete integrated design with

the chassis and the engine I think if we’d got further down the porscheck turbo route then we would have been sort of adapting

to the Honda engine and it wouldn’t perhaps be as idealized it did make it

late and I was well aware that it put everybody else were the beginning of the process and it put everybody else late

to build the car to test the car to get it to Brazil I suppose the whole thing was eight months from the very beginning

of the thought processes to to being on the track anymore so Steve there were 17

of us under you as the chief designer I was assigned responsibilities for the

sort of forward part of the monocot in those box and the front suspension in terms of the layout and the and the

detail design but then we had some really great people we had um David north of course doing the gearbox

um David Nielsen on the rear suspension Hugh Moran often overlooked but a great

kiwi engineer who with a little Hewlett Packard calculator managed to work out all the Angles and

hard points of the of the drop-in piece of the cockpit which we’ll talk about at some point that was incredibly difficult

to make that all fit the two pieces together so Huey did it did a great job

there here we are goes at the back of the car we’ve got to look at some detail here let’s talk about the rear wing and

adjustability of downforce fast to slow circuits well the circuits uh through

the year are very different you know place like uh Monaco Hungary you’d want maximum downforce biggest Wing that sort

of thing in places like Monza then you’d want to minimize that so we had two

three different sizes of rear wing and then the flap here is adjustable you can

see on this one there’s three positions so you can increase the angle of attack of the flap to to adjust the downforce

there and also the you see there’s holes in the flap here where we could bolt on different sizes of the so-called Gurney

flap to further increase the adjustment range of of the rear wing

so yeah it was a matter of optimizing the the amount of downforce there to

suit the particular circuit that we were at at the time and the other thing I remember um

such was the um Aero load pushing in the M fences because the low

pressure these things were Bend under and then you came up with this design and I remember we had it bolted

permanently but it would break this off sure so then we made this little adjustable slider which was so it keeps

the wing from flapping around yeah flexibility there for me about that it

was not carried over on the following Year’s car and the five that’s true and I’m never quite sure why Neil did didn’t

maybe then maybe the inferences were stiffer well I think they were largely the same but um

even like a wicker Bill going flat on hand yeah to increase the or the

difference of pressure well it helps a little bit with the stiffness of the end plate right also it gives you a little

more uh difference assumption so to speak to call the air around so we had three I think an R1 R2 and R3 yeah yeah

this was the R3 but I think the lowest time yes uh option but to change it you

you I’m unbelt it and change the whole unit yeah it changed the whole yeah and it was

easy easy to use and we had for for Simplicity and recognition remember we had a color coding yeah paint color

coding orange yellow and blue of the different options so we always knew

we’ve got the right combination I’ll tell you a funny story about the back end of this

the regulation after the race scrutinary and and anytime during

scrutiny and one of the requirement was you had to be able to engage reverse well we used to get so much wind up on

the gear shift yeah that it wouldn’t quite take it far enough at the back and

so the screwed in there would be at the front with Gary and he’d be showing them to engage and one of us at

the back would sneak a spanner on and just twisted around the tweak so because you can imagine that you’re the wind up

there’s a gear shift there and and there’s that linkage in between which is all fairly small tubes and you just get

that torsional wind up that was at record with proston Center they were Dyson Dyson with 10 laps to go

I didn’t know he was going to win and the nut came undone the lock nut and the

center lost the sideways movement and thereafter we put a lock tab on it to

make sure that so the last thing you did before the race was make sure he was happy with it and bang

so the front Wing was also had a range of adjustment so that we could have low

down Force at places like Monza and high down Force at Monaco are Hungary

so you can see there’s holes across the flap here so we could put the gurney flaps on there or take them off for more

and less downforce and then you see here there’s there’s a there’s a number of

holes there to adjust the angle of attack of the flap and they’re in in

very fine increments really so that you had to have three rows of holes because if you try to do them all in one row

they would run into each other and you just have a slot now I remember one time

Ayrton had a he had some high-speed unders journey and he wanted an adjustment so I said

well we’ll we’ll add one more hole of uh of flap and he said no it’s it’s too

much and I said well we’ll just raise one flap on one

side not do the other side uh and he said now that’s still too much

so I said okay we’ll move it up one hole but I’ll get the mechanics to slot that

hole so that we can move it down a little bit more and effectively it’ll be a half a hole on one side

and he said yeah okay that’ll be that’ll be good he was that sensitive you know

that he could feel these tiny little arrow adjustments and even on things like tire pressure I’d arrive on the

grid he used to like to do three laps through the pits before the start of the race to get some

temperature into the tire and he’d arrive on the grid and he’d want me to adjust the tire pressure by a quarter of

a PSI which probably made no difference but it made him feel happy and gave him a bit more

confidence so extremely sensitive to the adjustments uh on the car just from an

aesthetic point of view I was Keen to maintain a family resemblance so to speak and make it look like a McLaren so

it’s still kind of a chisel shaped nose I’m sure it made no difference Stephen I can remember you really agonizing over

the exactly it’s dark it sounds Daft now

I did kind of want it like I wanted it but so then just carrying on a little

bit you know we had the little windscreen here and and you can see that it’s it’s like two shapes there’s a

shape here and then there’s this additional shape there and we wanted to carry that line through uh

you know a lot of times you get a car and there’s a there’s a shape here and a shape there and it’s kind of like connect the dots and I wanted it to sort

of flow from one end to the other so that same shape carries right through so you’ve got those two shapes again here

and and then they blend out there kind of like a teardrop shape behind the uh

the drivers head so I had to rely on Matthew with these artistic skills to do these little

sketches and come up with the shape and and then our manufacturing people were able to

turn that into their beautiful and Colin Smith of course who did all the Bodywork sections I mean he was sort of tearing

his hair out a bit in terms of because you’ve obviously got hard points to to miss underneath but but to get exactly

what you wanted but the way I think the way we did that is Colin did all those sections every 100 millimeters or when

there was a little more detail maybe every 50 millimeters and then wasn’t it Eminem Hughes that had two yeah so he

had to do this wooden shape he had that special sort of soft fine-grained wood and and it was quite impressive I

thought because because you could go there and you could just run your hand over the shape

of that wooden buck and it’s amazing what you can feel you know and it’d be

just a little wobble and he’d smooth that out and you could you could make it just perfect with those hand techniques

so to speak later on I know when we got into surfacing and our CAD jockeys would do all these

surfaces and there’d be various surfaces that they have to knit them together and and you’d look at it on the screen and

you’d think yeah that’s good and then they’d machine it so it’s done on CAD machined on cam and you’ve got this huge

lump tooling block and you and you’d run your hand over it and you think there’s a little wiggle there and it would be

where they’d knitted two surfaces together and it just wasn’t quite perfect in the digital world and and

then we’d have to you know sort of apply that little bit of hand fatling to make it just perfect so I remember Steve the

you had a good idea of once you knew the engine obviously we knew the few the

fuel capacity um you wanted to change the monocot to go away from the v-shape that we used to

have to a more flat-sided shape so the fuel center of gravity came down a bit and then we our job was to take your

ideas and and scheme them out so I can remember my Wonder scheme that I called it you

know of the of this section of the of the car and uh from that we we detailed

on the drawing board uh not on CAD yeah in 8788 but we detailed the uh the

various Concepts as schemes just to make sure everything was going to fit in I wanted to do things a little bit

differently in that era of the mp43 and the mp44 we’d we’d been pretty tightly

controlled by John Bernard in the previous years and now is our chance to do something of our own and I was aware

that I didn’t want to restrict everybody to exactly my ideas I wanted everybody

to contribute I used to be quite self-critical but I would also encourage everybody to criticize my ideas you know

when we’d get to the position where nobody could come up with some reasons why it wouldn’t work then it gave me confidence yeah that it uh that it that

it would work my job more than anything was to try to integrate all the ideas

into a whole to get the right compromise of everything so to speak you know there

were 17 of us we all really got on well together we were a proper team it was really quite good you know at the time

we were just a bunch of nobodies and we all liked each other respected each other worked well together and this to

me was the ultimate expression of teamwork and everybody could feel invested in the car just to give you a

little background about how these cars are made if I can go right back to the

very early 80s when we did the very first carbon fiber monocoque with um

we’ve done a deal with Hercules in America I had I had worked at Hercules

straight out of University uh and we went to them to get the carbon

components made it was very Leading Edge and very Visionary of uh John Barnard to

to take the risk and attempt to make a whole monocoque out of uh out of carbon fiber so the initial parts of the Monaco

the main shell and the the bulkheads that went inside that shell to make it a

complete monocoque were laminated by Hercules in Salt Lake City and then they

would send those parts to us and we would Bond them all together to form the completed monocoque later the next stage

of our development in the manufacturing of these monocox Hercules would Supply

us with all the carbon fiber materials of the prepreg unidirectional carbon

things like that the resins and the fibers and then we would laminate those components ourselves in the

beginning we didn’t have an autoclave so that we would assemble the whole thing on the on the mold and it would be all

vac bagged and prepared to go into an autoclave and then we would load that into a trailer with a vacuum pump to

keep the vacuum on the on the monocoque while it was transported down to the

south coast and we used somebody else’s autoclave to to cook the thing

then later quite soon after that in fact we we managed to buy and install our own

autoclave and then we could do all those processes ourselves but Hercules were still a sponsor and still provided this

with all the raw materials to to do the lamination more and more of the car became carbon fiber this one monocox

carbon the body works all carbon the wings are all carbon and of course later on even all the suspension was carbon

and gearbox case was carbon so it was it was the beginning of a process starting

in 1981 and now the cars you see there are almost all carbon it seems like one

interesting detail that changed over the course of the Season uh initially the car had

a snorkel in this area for the air Inlet for the turbo so there’s a turbo either

side and and Huey Moran had done this fairly complex shape to to have a sort

of trapezoidal shaped air Inlet here that would then morph into a round shape

where it went into the into the turbo for the Silverstone Grand Prix in July

we changed to a system where we eliminated that snorkel and the air

would enter through the radiator Inlet up here just a bit simpler the car looks

better without those snorkels and it it reduces the drag by a minuscule amount I

suppose but it was yeah one of the nice detailed changes that happened through the course of the year the cars are

obviously the amount of red and white it’s called Rocket red and it’s kind of

a day glow red it’s quite a special paint and to have it come out that color you

first have to paint the whole car white and then the red has to go on over the white

undercoat so to speak to come out the right color so it’s completely white and then the red on top of that so that’s

extra paint and then you have to have a ultraviolet resistant clear coat that goes on top of

that so that’s another coat of paint that goes on you know so the entire paint job is probably seven kilos you

know which I’m always uh probably overly insistent on the car being lightweight

so seven kilos of paint is really quite irritating I guess run overruled it well

yeah absolutely obviously Ron wanted the cars perfect every race so George had to

paint the car in between every race I wanted the cars as light as possible so I didn’t want multiple layers of

paint so I’m insisting that George stripped the car back to Bare carbon between every race because Ron wants it

repainted between every race and of course what George used to say to me is Lou you can’t rush the chemicals it

takes a certain amount of time to dry and of course you know the cars come back from a race maybe they get back on

Tuesday and they’re going to leave about eight days later saying he’s got a strip and repaint so I remember once I was

down with George in the paint shop and you have to put the paint stripper on you can’t leave it very long or it

attacks the resin in the carbon and then he uses your scraper to scrape it off and he’s he’s scraping the thing off

like this and I can see you know you look at it it looks like a barber puller set you could see red white red white

red white where he’s painted it three or four times and I’m saying oh George you’re stripping it back to Bear carbon

every time he wants all this red white red white red wine so so yeah that was a

constant uh constant battle I used to I tried I didn’t get away with this one either but

I told George look put the stickers on the bare carbon paint it then peel the

stickers off and we’ll have bare carbon whereas Marlborough is that’s like yeah that’s

great it says a little bit away but Ron came along and he the the current wasn’t shiny enough so so we had

to go back to this and uh there’s another half an ounce on the car yeah

looking at this actually I remember after Brazil where the the roller Hoops

were left bare titanium and in fact they were coated with a Teflon

spray material which I think George sourced into anyway to make any rubber

or any debris that went on the slide off easily but I remember going down to the

um the factory off to Brazil and then coming in one morning and the all of a sudden all the cars had white roll hoops

and I said George what’s happened he said Ron Ron happened because the boss

was down here in Brazil and he was and either boss or Ron wasn’t happy with it

so he could he could sell more expensive space and he needed the contrast between

the black ones and the white roll yeah I must have it does look better why I think so yeah but it’s the highest point

on the car so it’s the most important way you can have and then the emergency pull handle I remember the night of the

first car build just before it went to England the all-nighter that we did somebody said where’s the pool handle

and nobody had didn’t exist so I can remember about four o’clock in

the morning drawing something up and then Austin going and making it and George spraying it and it was it was

made in about three hours flat but uh yeah [Music]

thank you [Music]

[Music]

[Music]

so uh now that we have the Bodywork off you can you can sort of see the Air Management of the car all of the air

enters here and you can see there’s the radiator here for the air to pass through and then there’s a a small space

here where part of the air then is ducted around and into the intercooler

here and then in between those two around the inboard end of the radiator

and then around the outboard end of the intercooler the uh the air for the turbo

comes around that sort of s-bend and and then into the turbocharger as you can

see there so that that’s really the whole air management system on the on

the car uh the exhaust was uh all made out of inconel as I recall a higher

grade a steel it’s very temperature resistant and as you can see there there’s the the main exhaust out of the

turbo and then another secondary exhaust out of the wastegate there and then they

both exit through the diffuser you know we were restricted and so we had to run

this pop-off valve here given to us by the FIA there have been stories in the

past about people that felt that maybe Honda were maybe not exactly cheating but exploiting the rules by trying to

place the pop-off valve in an area where the pressure wasn’t necessarily the same

as in the in the rest of the inlet manifold there and therefore we could run a little higher uh horsepower uh

it’s a bit of a spurious argument because we’re limited to 150 liters of fuel so even if we could find a way to

cheat the pop-off valve we we would have run out of fuel before the end of the race so it’s very much a function of

trying to manage how much horsepower you could run throughout the duration of the race we ran in the race just over 600

horsepower maybe maybe as much as 650 in qualifying um it was adjustable horsepower though

and you have to remember that you know this was a period of time where they

were running normally aspirated cars and the turbo cars at the same time uh the the normally aspirated cars were the

future and the FIA wanted them to to win and so they had they had a weight

advantage or they could run I can’t remember I think 20 kilos lighter than we could we were restricted boost

pressure and 150 liters of fuel so so the rules were all stacked against us really good particularly in the early

stage of the race we’d have to turn the boost up a little bit to stay ahead of the normally aspirated cars and and then

gradually as they would die away and well the drivers could turn down the Boost and with their controls on the

dash and then reduce the Boost reduce the revs lift and coast and the other

thing the drivers had to do because people talk about it being a economy run but what it really meant is they were

limited on horsepower and they had to take all their speed out of the car itself not not just turn the boost up

and and run extra horsepower they had to take it out of the car and they had to take it out of themselves so they had to

be right on the limit every corner every lab to try to maximize the performance

and and finish the race on the fuel so particularly towards the end of the race we might be two laps down on the fuel

and then they’d have to recover maybe over the last 10 or 15 laps they’d have to try to recover that two laps of fuel

in order to to finish the race so well we were very fortunate to have this Honda engine it was it was a highly

developed engine that had been running for years we’ve been running with spirit and and with Williams and and with lotus

so when we received it it was just a beautiful engine package generated quite adequate horsepower and it got a very

good fuel economy in order to finish the race on 150 liters of fuel compared to our previous tag turbo designer built by

Porsche it was more compact it was lower so we were able to make the whole

installation the whole car a bit lower and more compact the Porsche engine

was run effectively like two three cylinder engines and so it had two of

these pop-up valves two of these logs one for each three cylinder bank with with two of these pop-off valves back

here so the back end of the fourth three was more bulbous in that area because of the taller engine and and the two the

two pop-off valves I remember early on with in our relationship with Honda and

they used to send young Engineers rotate through the factory to for experience and one of the young Engineers messaged

me back from from Japan saying how he’d appreciated his experience in the UK and

and now he was working far into the night to improve reliability and at that

stage we’d had one engine failure in in testing you know they were still giving

it all to improve improve the engine reliability Honda were fantastic in that

regard you know they would hit it with all the resources you know you’d have a debrief and

there’d be these problems and and they had so much staff so much resource that they’d probably signed through for

engineers to each problem whereas we were much smaller and and it was the opposite with us each engineer

would be assigned three or four problems so uh but it was uh it was a great

experience working with Honda and even though they were pretty much the other side of the world we worked

so well the engine as I say was it was quite low and this was enabled uh for

the most part because Tilden had come up with this multi-plate carbon clutch so a smaller diameter which meant you could

lower the whole engine uh and in fact it was so low that the gearbox was too low and the drive shaft angles weren’t

practical so we had to design a new gearbox that had a third shaft an extra

pair of Gears to to raise the output level up to something that was suitable for the drive shafts

and for that job we we commissioned Pete Wiseman to do the concept of the gearbox

and he worked with our Engineers to come up with that concept and then our

gearbox designer Dave North brilliant engineer and and he did all the detailed

design on on that gearbox and it it performed flawlessly really and of

course he carried on to do the next year’s car with a transverse gearbox also done

in conjunction with uh with Pete Wiseman but but that allowed us to to have the

engine as low as possible uh Lotus using the same engine

had opted not to do that and they tilted the engine to raise the back end of the engine up but that sort of cut in half

the advantage of having the low center of gravity of the engine because it was partially raised up in the air at the

back so it’s just another little example of us doing a thoroughly integrated design

between the between the engine and the and the chassis if we look at our Circa

simulation program we know that if you can reduce the weight of the car by 10

kilograms it’s worth on average three tenths of a second hence the extensive use of of carbon fiber

and where are we down to the weight limit yeah yeah without any balanced yeah so uh so the weight was very

important the other thing that was very important to me was center of gravity the uh the weight of the car as you go

around the corner to the the force acts through the center of gravity which is

obviously some way off the ground and that tends to make the car uh want to roll and once again from our

computerized circuit simulation program we know that if you can lower the center of gravity by just 10 millimeters that’s

worth on average about three tenths of a second per lap so so I was always dead

keen on as light as possible and Center gravity everything on the car is as low

as we could possibly make it so this car ended up being quite low and I think as

we’ve mentioned before the Honda engine was lower and more Compact and that meant that we could once again Lower the

center of gravity we did other things for example other materials the over the

years we as we’ve mentioned before we machined our own calipers from billets of aluminum to improve the braking

characteristics to make the calipers stiffer so the brake pedal was was firmer in the beginning it was just

aluminum aluminum alloy but later on I knew that there was this very stiff

very light material called aluminum beryllium so I wanted aluminum beryllium calipers

so we went our caliper supplier was AP and I I went AP and said to them I

wanted aluminum beryllium calipers and they initially said no no they didn’t they didn’t want to make them and

and I said well we can do one of three things uh you can make them for us

or you can license us to make them with your drawings or we’ll just design our own but one way or the other we’re going

to have aluminum beryllium calipers and So eventually they relented and made these calipers for us aluminum beryllium

is not all our plentiful supplied by brush Wellman in America and and Ron Dennis brought bought every bit of

aluminum beryllium in the world that’s big enough to make calipers so so nobody else could have them because there was

no material available uh so I’d been to Bob ilman our financial director and and

said I want this lightweight aluminum beryllium for the calipers and within a

few days you know we’re trying to make the car as light as possible so that we can carry more ballast and we can put

the ballast down low and at one stage This was later than this car but at one

stage we’d got the car to where it was uh 70 kilos under the weight limit so we

were carrying 70 kilos of ballast lead was just way too light and took up too

much space so you know I was asking our financial director for all this expensive lightweight aluminum beryllium

and and also there’s very heavy tongue and he didn’t quite understand but of

course you need the right material in the right place lightweight stiff calipers but compact lightweight

tungsten ballast one interesting story which caused us a little bit of grief to

say the least um just probably a week before the car was due to run at

imler Ray Rowe also known as tax who had been

one of Bruce’s Originals back in the early 60s and was still with us and still is with McLaren from time to time

walked into the drawing office as he sometimes did with the with the rack and pinion

assembly in his hands and he was just twiddling the pinion and the rack watching the rat going in and out and I

was in Steve’s office with Stephen and text sides up to us and says um

I’ve been playing with this for half an hour now and I’m pretty sure that when the driver

turns right the car’s going to go left now when it’s only seven days before the

car is supposed to run if that was true and text being who he was and being around forever generally doesn’t make

that kind of mistake we were basically pretty

alarmed and panicked so it transpired of course that this car as opposed to many

of the previous McLarens has the steering rack and pinion on the front

bulkhead so that the track rods the steering arms ahead of the front axle which means that the pinion is on the

opposite side of the rack to text as he would probably previously remember it so once we’d explained to him that

that was the case everybody was relieved that we didn’t have a major disaster in

my hands well let’s talk about the first race Brazil and we we said earlier that this car was in pieces when it arrived

we had all the suspension with us and so we started assembling it but it’s worth

noting that this is the car we talked about where the bulkhead fell out and this is our Trackside repair

in the field and we did a carbon composite repair with Steve obviously

overseeing it approving it but done by us mechanics not very pretty but it

worked and so the process arriving at the track

uh this car wouldn’t have had the engine in in fact often the um the engines would arrive at the

circuit and we’d fit the engines at the circuit the suspension was on the setup was done at the factory although we used

to water the setup at the track there’s an interesting little detail on this car which I said to Matthew what are these

little weenie blocks down here for so this is a little ride height datum and so that’s what you’d use to measure the

rice so we had the setup wheels on on the bar across the top and with a burnout Vernier you measure down to that

datum and that datum was set at the factory on the surface table to the suspension point so all the cars that

was in exactly the right position fairly easy to put together I mean you know

what they say it’s only nuts and bolts and the mechanics are very dexterous so just a question of assembling everything

these cars um in this period everything so the datums are machined the

wishbone’s a machine like these wishbones you know you haven’t got to bend them in position they are machined

to to Dimensions everything is drawn and machined which um earlier cars you know

one Wishbone wouldn’t fit another car so everything fits nicely three guys on

each car um number one mechanic and two number two mechanics number two mechanic one of

them would be a front end man 101 would be a rear end man the number one guy would oversee but the number one guy

would generally do all the in-tank fuel system you know the hatch would come off the

fuel bags or the pumps he would do that part A gearbox guy traveled with us as well

so we wouldn’t change the ratio as if there was a ratio change the mechanics would

strip the back end off and put it in a tray and then the gearbox guy would come along obviously the engineers had

selected the ratios and he would assemble them all in the back cover and then we would put it back

on and bolt it up the engine was Honda’s total responsibility and we had probably

1500 guys at the track so we had Goto a top man genius he was

the manager director of the Honda operation generally we had

a Honda mechanic allocated to each car and then we had the guys doing the data

and adjustments process of starting the car so right you’ve got to put the fuel in so qualifying you had a you had a

different fuel in qualifying to racing so we talked about the limitation of

fuel capacity 150 liters in 88. and the Turbo limit this was to try and get

equivalency with the three and a half liter cars but what what wasn’t mentioned was the rocket fuel that the

turbo cars ran there were no restriction on fuel so we qualified with 80 toluene I don’t

know if you remember that and we raced with about 60 tolene tolerene is oxygen generating Fuel and

it’s Rocket Fuel so with only 150 liters we could run generally full performance throughout

the race without any fuel limitation very dense fuel as well our mechanic would operate the starter these cars are

starting they don’t have an onboard starter and equally if you spun one of these cars you could stall it nowadays

you’ve got anti-stall on Formula One cars so no on board starter so the starter electric starter is plugged in

the rear and it engages with the lay shaft so our guys on the starter the Honda guys on the throttle and on any

adjustments to the engine management and uh check the oil level which is in

here fire it up run it for

20 seconds stop the engine check the oil level then start it again and then warm it up so Honda are doing all the warm-up

so shelded yeah fuel engine or gearbox oil and they really

did a great job for us I mean they obviously we all contributed but they helped us win the championship I think

we talked about the temperature current troll so there’s no thermostatic temperature control no adjustment on the

the cooling it’s all preset so the amount of air that’s allowed to go through the radiator has to be

decided by the engineer and the ambient temperature of the day put that amount of blank in on and hope

it doesn’t get too hot a fixed ECU so once the chip is loaded in programmed by

Honda that was it that was set in fact so we’d run the car on the track in

practice do four or five laps they come in and they take all their readings and Lambda readings and then they take the

chip out and they might have another one ready with another adjustment put that in and then they’d adjust the chip they’ve

taken out so they changed it by a chip in the ECU

um I was under Steve working on the design of the forward part well really

from the driver forward uh Monaco and nosebox and front suspension and the

design that we came up with was because the driver’s feet had to be

on the front axle line or at least behind the front axle line which meant in effect on the front and Axle line so

the the pedal faces had to be there it determined the driving position from

that point backwards so the monocot structure which uh includes this

insert which was we called it a bathtub but in effect it’s a separately molded piece that drops in and it includes the

seat back bulkhead the side panels and the the steering bulkhead all molded in

one piece very complex molding with the driver’s feet on the axle line

the natural position for the dampers had been kind of in line with with the where

the driver’s feet were now positioned so that wasn’t an option and we looked at

different ideas we looked at putting the dampers on the top which we later did on the mp46 but for this car Steve was

fairly insistent that keep the the mass as low as we could for all components we

found two pockets whereby the damper the spring damper assemblies could go in and sit nicely

operated by a pull Rod the only problem with that then was the fact that traditionally a pull Rod pulls on a

rocker and The Rocker if we had one would be right in the way of the driver’s legs and the legality template

I was chatting to Dave North who said well why don’t you use tracks instead of a rocker so the idea was born and we put

tracks in at the bottom so the damper is now actually traveling on rollers in

tracks that track prescribes the ark that a rocker would have moved in but the rocker is no longer there it just it

just follows that that track so it’s kind of a virtual rocker you might say and then the only problem not the only

problem but a problem was the fact that a conventional anti-roll bar couldn’t fit in either because there was

no space again in the volume that you needed for the legality template to pass through the cockpit we came up with a a

slightly different solution which you’ll you’ll see in detail but uh it’s in

effect it’s it’s the blades of the bar go across the car and then there’s a central torque tube which pivots just

behind just in front of the the steering bulkhead and it’s shaped a bit like the old-fashioned lawnmower handle so it

became known as the lawnmower handle front anti-roll bar but the whole assembly ends up looking a bit of an age

yeah you know the you’ve got the mountings across one end Matthew

mentions the blades these blades were flat in one plane and sort of an elliptical shape in the other so that as

you twisted a flat position would be soft and then the vertical position would be would be hard and that’s the

way you got the adjustment in the in the roll bar and then the adjuster for that for those blades is is here and

previous to this instructions going on to the side of the car the the drivers

memorized it by knowing it was um hard going in and soft coming out quite

why they remembered it like that I’m not sure it might be interesting to note about the pull rod and Rising Rays some

people might not understand Rising rate this Arc that I was prescribing it would

change the so-called wheel rate you know that has to do with the mechanical advantage that you have in the

suspension so because of the way the this Arc worked

as you pulled on the pull Rod the further it would go up this Arc the stiffer the front suspension would

become so that meant as the car pitched as you braked into a corner and you

pulled therefore on the pull Rod the suspension would effectively become stiffer and this this helped stabilize

the car on Entry to the corners and it helped with the pitch sensitivity of the

car and inevitably the car the arrow Center pressure will move somewhat as the car pitches and by having that uh

Rising rate effect it limited how much the car would pitch so it became quite a

strong tuning feature that’s one of the things that changed the most often to balance the car was lengthening or

shortening that it would do quite a lot of things if I said to the driver well

I think I want to I want to lower the car increase the rising rate reduce the Gap

to the bump rubber they’d say well you want to do all that at once at the same time you know it sounds crazy and I’d

say well okay what about if we just shorten the push or the pull rod and they’d say yeah okay do that

yeah there’s three Master cylinders there one for the clutch and and one for the front brakes and one for the rear

brakes something else you might want to look at is the steering column which

obviously had to clear the driver’s toes when the with the brake pedal being right in the in the middle and we

decided to offset the pinion just so that it gave enough access for

the mechanics to get their hands in otherwise it would have been on the center line there wasn’t we didn’t want

to make a bigger hole than we needed to for the for the access let’s talk about fuel capacity and 150

liter limit so the fuel cap is underneath this little

cover so the fuel cell is here this is the way

the fuel is filled normally we’d have a quick release fastening on there

because this car has been on test this has got a sealed cap but we have a push turn aircraft fitting so my job

well let’s say at the factory first so how do we control the 150 liters exactly

and we needed every last drop of fuel so the fuel bag

by Design would hold 154 and then we had to size it down to 150 liters for each Race

So at the factory we would alter the fuel capacity by dropping in

plastic balls and we’d measure and measure and measure at the factory to make sure it didn’t exceed 150 liters my

job at the race one of my jobs on the grid my last job on the grid was the car would have 150

liters of 149 and a half as it left the garage but of course it’s using a little bit of fuel to get to the grid so when

it came to the grid and stop my job was I had a five foot tall tube with a big

tank on the top with another five liters and I would have to stand on top of the monocoque

and release the cap and put the last drop of fuel into brim full it with a

little bit of pressure that was how we and every race every race we won we had to take the fuel cell

open we had to dry all the fuel out completely dry and then the FIA

would watch as we measured the fuel in and generally we were what we were always under 150 liters okay let’s talk

about the cockpit if I can remember all the controls a long time ago so steering wheel

we’ve got a radio button and a boost button an overtake button

that’s all on the steering wheel we have a manual gear lever so it’s got

a six-speed gearbox means that they’ve got it when they shift downshift they’ve got to blip the

throttle this is not a seamless shift box like they have now so clutch and

manual gear shift let’s talk on this side so we’ve got um

ignition switch and pumps so these are in tank pumps that pushes the fuel from the bottom of

the tank up to the collector pot ignition on and off we’ve got boost control which they get a readout on the dash how

much boost pressure radio on off button

these switches here this this here is for the dampers we have shower

dampers on this car and quite Advanced shower or part of Honda and these

dampers front and rear were adjustable this is oil pressure warning light and

and fuel warning light fire extinguisher button so fire extinguisher which

provides fire extinguisher gas to the driver and also has a pipe

goes to the engine this is not the original bottle the original bottle was made by McLarens it’s shaped to clear

the drivers back in the driver’s legs and we had the bottles filled but that bottle is not a recognized safety

bottle now and also you can’t get them refilled so this is a proprietary current bottle

light so this is the rain light which is a FIA regulation

the all drivers have to put it on when there’s a visibility problem

of course you’ve got a removable steering wheel which has a flexible cable connection

and then you have the front adjustable roll bar so this operates a blade in

there which Steve was talking about and you can see the blade

this one here break blast adjuster so F and R front

and rear so you’ve got two Master cylinders one for the front baits one for the rear brakes and you’ve got a

screw adjuster so you can adjust how much break you have on the front and how much on the rear same as on a modern

Formula One car but they’ve got a more computer controlled lever this is

a simple um if you look down there you can see that’s the office these pads were

mentioning these this is to protect the driver’s elbows from getting bruised on the tub when

he’s working the steering wheel this is a this was a mechanics um trim piece I remember doing these that’s it

that’s the cop well you know the cockpit on these cars is inevitably a pretty tight squeeze and

The Prost had been with us for a while and we were designing the the this part of the car around him and when Santa

arrived um quite a tight squeeze and he said oh I’ve been working out in Brazil

you know in an upper body strength and all that and he was really tight on his shoulders and I said uh

uh maybe you could stop now with the exercise

it was yeah it was a tight squeeze yeah I don’t know the old girl looks pretty

good to me all these uh years later I suppose I’m a prejudiced but it’s just lovely really the Aesthetics of it it

looks nice with the Bodywork on and you know seeing all the beautiful work underneath

you know the efforts of the designers the efforts of the Fabricators the efforts of the

laminators you know to make all these components and you know look at all these pieces it’s just a mechanical art

you know and it’s uh it’s fantastic and speaking to the design process you know

I was really uh I was really privileged to be given the opportunity to to to do this you know

working at a major Formula One team with a major budget and working with such a

talented group of Engineers uh you know we were

we’d worked together for a few years and uh I don’t know it was beyond team it was

most almost more like family and you know we liked each other we worked

well together we respected each other we discussed thing and and we all moved forward in the in the

same direction so it was a fantastic thing to create this

and it was a fantastic thing to see it be built by the other talented people

who who made it all who did the laminating and the welding and the fabricating and the Machining and the

mechanics they screwed it together and everybody that did such a fantastic job I remember once in

conversation with Rick Goodhand one of the mechanics he said we knew that the

design was fantastic and we knew that the drivers were fantastic and that if

anything was going to screw it up it was us the mechanics that were going to let the side down so he said we made

absolutely sure that we were doing everything as perfect as we could and

hence you get this reliability and you know 15 out of 16 races ten one twos

it’s just the ultimate expression

of the advantage of teamwork and that’s the main memory I take away from it

always working with all those people in in the Fantastic sort of family atmosphere yeah

all the time with McLaren you’d be their your own salaries and you’re not getting paid for but all these people are being

on a Saturday morning you know not getting paid but there was just nowhere else they’d rather be I

just remember it being a really intense period you know between August 87 and when the car had to first run and as

that time got near and nearer we were under more and more pressure to to you know obviously do the best job we

could but just to get it may get everybody and give everybody enough time to get it made was one thing the fact

that it went to England that that phone call back to say it’s within five laps it’s two and two

seconds quicker than anybody’s gone previously it was just absolutely incredible there’s a perfect storm of

you know Ron putting together that team uh JB having taught us what he knew we

sort of continued with a lot of his philosophies all the people that really as you say

Steve pull together as a as a team and just we’re just interested in

you know contributing to the McLaren family as we were it was kind of I guess

looking back on it now it was kind of a leap of faith on Ron’s part too yeah it

put us in charge of doing this at the time I felt that it was the culmination of all the experience of McLaren over

the years coming together in this you know the best that we could think of for

me I have to say it’s been a fantastic day to see this car in beautiful condition

beautifully restored a full-running car and to be here as Chris’s guess and to

do this YouTube presentation it’s been a great experience we could talk for hours

and hours couldn’t we but for me I am I’d left the team in 81 to set up my own

F3 team and I knew Santa when he was coming up through Formula Three

so when I came back to work for Ron in 85 to do the new Factory and then I was

on the team in 87 with Prost and Stefan I was coming back in to raise him but um

when 88 came round and I knew that airton was coming on board with LA

and Ron asked me to be a chief mechanic uh

I was so thrilled to be able to well I’d worked a year with Elaine with the tag

engine but I was thrilled to be with Adam as well and and what a year you know well two

years because the year after was good so um I sat down with Ron uh when he asked

me to be Chief mechanic and uh he agreed my salary and I said and prize money and

he said well hang on he said we might have a very good year and I said well we

might have a bad year so he said okay same as the mechanics 50 pound a point

end of 88 I came home with ten thousand pound prize money and probably

the best year of racing that I’ve had since 1968. in fact the year after we had equally

good success and for me that was the way of going out back into a job in the factory to finish

tracks that I with this car and the subsequent car and also got to mention Honda what a great job

they did I know the engine had been fully developed but they were full on I think everybody probably says they have

whatever they’re doing or whatever stages of their career they’re in you know they do something special and

it’s you know it’s special to them but we truly were in a golden era formula

everything yeah to win a championship everything’s got to come together in the year your drivers tires chassis

engine every reliability as well our guys my guys on my team can’t say my

guys the guys I work with every detail every fixing every nut and bolt and

torque check and they do the same now but um yeah for me it was a magic yeah well there we

go with a film like that I’m not sure it strictly needs an outro but I’m gonna do one anyway a huge thank you to everybody

involved today particularly my three on-screen co-stars and Damani and Anthony Marcano from my second Channel

JM and friends who once again have been behind at the other cameras helping make this stuff possible and none of it could

be doable without you too so make sure to hit that like button comment down below subscribe if you haven’t already

to this Channel and JM and friends and I hope to see you for the next one bye

foreign [Music]