Ah…the McLaren Indy debacle that serves to prove that McLaren’s hitherto weakness for gross incompetence hasn’t entirely been forgotten, but seemingly grasps to Fernando’s coattails like shit to a blanket.
Perhaps the first question that I’d ask is why would the Indy campaign be headed by proven F1 maestro Bob Fernley, while the F1 campaign is co-managed by Indy maestro Gil De Ferran? It’s easy to point towards isolated incidents like the steering wheel, but this leads me to suspect that the relationship between McLaren and Cosworth was dysfunctional, I can’t believe that Cosworth didn’t ask “what about the gear levers?”.
Something is clearly very wrong with the Indy management structure, either Fernley was unaware of fundamental problems like the spare car being at the paintshop and not at the circuit, or he was unable to ensure that such problems were addressed. We’ve seen this before at McLaren and are seeing it now at Williams; poor communications across departments lead to fundamental and insurmountable problems.
Credit to Fernando though – he declined the offer of having a seat further up the grid bought for him, which would have been an affront to sportsmanship.
