Wheeler adds that by continuing to develop older cars using lessons learnt in the years since, the race team’s staff benefit as well.
“If we knew what we know now of technology, we’d have made those heat shields back in time like we are now,” he says. “It’s a learning platform for mechanics, people, and components and materials. It’s still going on.”
The heat shielding solution has since been preemptively applied to other cars from the late 2000s and early 2010s, including one that was recently sold. To the untrained eye, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, but that’s key to the process. Function is important, but so is form.
“A lot of stuff on the chrome cars [that] we’ve had fail, we can actually make even better now, because the technology’s moved on so much to what it was 10 years ago,” says Ben Dunmore, a build and test technician for McLaren Heritage. “We can make it better. We’re not going to change the appearance of the car, but the actual workings of it, we can make better.”
Thynne reveals that some of the older machines have also been converted to run on modern electronics to counter other potential risks that sometimes arise.
“The most important aspect of heritage is understanding what’s going on inside the engine,” he says. “So with our ‘80s cars we’ve occasionally had to go to a modern electronics system to run them safely, so you’re running risk mitigated as opposed to risky.”
Some customers refuse modifications though and as such don’t run their cars on-track (even though they remain functional). Some go as far as to keep their cars’ patina and battle scars to maintain their individual character.
“I had a long discussion with a customer asking ‘what would you like to do, because it’s faded?’ and he said ‘don’t touch it!’,” Thynne says. “Many of the customers are really really keen to have a car that is very clean, very smart, but has some patina, has stone chips as if it’s run, or has faded paintwork, because that’s the reality of a historic racing car.”
That maintains the car’s character and shows its unique individuality, but it also saves McLaren the painful job of repainting a car with a complex aerodynamic profile with the multi-layered chrome paint finish – an extremely intensive and difficult process.
“One of the significant complexities of chrome paint – and I’m so glad we don’t do it now – is if the customer had said ‘could you repaint it?’, you’d have to repaint everything because you can’t color match it.”
Certain other things simply can’t be changed. Despite streamlining processes and making things simpler, each car, regardless of what it is, needs period computing power to merely get it going. That means that also hiding in the same building is an aging laptop stockpile to compliment the car collection.
“You need a computer of that iteration,” Thynne says. “So the combination of our thinking and Mercedes’ thinking… we have tidied it up, because it was written by experts for that moment in time and you need to standardize things. We’re taking a systemized approach to it, but you need to run it on a period computer.”
The theme of keeping one eye on the future while preserving the past carries on with spares, too. Everywhere you look are countless labeled boxes containing parts for every car McLaren has ever produced, while upstairs are more boxes filled with meticulous session reports and rolls and rolls of paper design drawings.
The paper drawings were phased out a few years ago, and all existing hard copies up to that point have since been digitized. A sustainable approach has also been taken to the parts haul to stop the decades of inventory from getting out of control while enabling continued access to whatever might be needed.
“The quantity of parts is significant, so we have an archiving policy at the end of it, because if you didn’t you literally would own every metal-clad building in the south of England with the amount of parts,” Thynne says. “So we take a sensible sustainability approach on the tooling. We recut tools where it’s possible to reuse the raw material, and we sensibly dispose and ensure that we can maintain the cars.
“We build all four chassis into full states, give them a spares package, then take a pragmatic approach to what’s left. And it’s really important to do that otherwise you take this huge burden and carry it forward.
“What we’ve been doing over the last couple of years in this building is making sure we’re carrying that policy forward but also tidying up the legacy and what we will continue to use this area for storage.
“We’re trying to be sustainable, we’re trying to keep the assets alive, and we’re trying to keep something that’s manageable. It’s all bound into that strategy. If you’ve built all four cars and you’ve got some spares, you don’t need the tooling, because you have the digital representation of all the tools, so you can make the tooling again if you need to.
“The cost to keep that tool in case in 14 years time you might need to remake that part… it’s much more cost-effective to scrap all the tooling, recycle it, and if you need a part, remake the tool and remake the part.
“With modern manufacturing techniques, in some cases we can be quite creative. If you only need to make one, you can reverse engineer it.”
This embracing of team heritage is something that would have been unthinkable at McLaren as recently as a decade ago, but it’s one of several major changes brought about by Zak Brown since he became CEO of McLaren Racing in 2018.
“In the early days, Bruce and those guys were flat-out, worked and did everything. They did Can Am and IndyCar racing because it was big money and it paid for the Formula 1. That’s why they did it,” says Wheeler. “They weren’t thinking about history and keeping these cars then, they were doing a job and then they just moved onto the next car and the next design.
“It’s great that Zak is interested and loves all this stuff, because when we first came here, there were cars scattered around everywhere and nothing happened with them at all. They hadn’t turned a wheel for years. But slowly but surely, it’s nice to see them come back to life.
“They’ll all be done eventually, there’s just an order of when to do them. To finally see them come back and go round a circuit again is amazing.”
As the company wraps up its 60th anniversary year, Thynne believes that looking back is a key part of helping the race team move forward once again.
“In our 60th anniversary year, it’s probably the best way to put context around this: We are hugely driven to improve the performance of our Formula 1 team and continue our climb up the grid,” he says. “But you have to acknowledge the legacy of our past, the huge amount of success that we have had, the engineering development that has gone into all that, and keep it running so any member of the team is always able to look over their shoulder and just pause and consider what they’re a part of.
“Although we’re a hugely forward-thinking, driven, high-performance team, you have to acknowledge that you’re continuing to build a legacy that’s 60 years old.”
And while the Heritage Division’s purpose might be to honor the past, it’s extremely conscious of the future as well.
“In the short-to-medium term, it is absolutely possible to continue into the future, certainly with our extending contract with our PU partner,” Thynne says, reiterating the importance of McLaren’s relationship with Mercedes.
“The relationship with your engine partner is key. In a few weeks’ time we’re running multiple hybrid cars, and it’s just the same – we do the chassis, Mercedes supports the power unit and the battery. They bring that, we bring the car, we marry them together and monitor the systems in exactly the same way, and they continue to run.
“The strategy will continue to run in a collaborative fashion because it’s important that the cars are kept in running order for our history and legacy, but also the value of them is maintained if they are runners.
“I can’t speak for 20, 30, 40 years’ time, but our intent is that we will keep this alive because it’s a hugely important part of what we do. It’s important that we add a hybrid era onto that.
“At our 75th anniversary, it would be great to have the next era of cars represented, and we have every intent to continue to do that.”
As for the future of the fleet itself, the next cars to join the Heritage collection will be the 2021 cars, which will fall into the division’s remit on January 1 after they’re done with being the race team’s TPC – Testing Of Previous car – machine, and cease to be relevant to the race team’s activities.
“The current Formula 1 car will be moved into an archive and falls out of the cost cap as you roll into next year,” Thynne explains. ” The Formula 1 team keeps two year’s worth inside the facility, and that’s for two reasons: The TPC program, but also from a cost cap perspective, for inventory, if you can carry something over from one year to another, you don’t have to pay for it again. So that is economically efficient if parts have enough life. So up to two years stay in F1, then after that they come over to Heritage.
“We have ‘in-cap thinking’ and ‘out-of-cap thinking’. Out-of-cap thinking is TPC and Heritage, so that is how we actually segment it from a management and inventory perspective.
“Formula 1 is always the priority from a performance and cost management perspective, and occasionally where it’s carried over, we would actually buy new for the TPC car because you’re buying out of the cost cap for that.”
Just before I left, I got a glimpse of another quartet of championship-winning cars, which were being packed away for the Velocity Invitational event which will take place at Sonoma Raceway on November 10-12: MP4-23A-05 that Hamilton drove at the 2008 Brazilian grand prix to clinch his first championship crown; MP4/14A-04 that Hakkinen won the 1999 Japanese grand prix in to lock in his second title; MP4/6-10 driven by Ayrton Senna in his third and final championship season; and M23-5 that Emerson Fittipaldi drove in McLaren’s first drivers’ and constructors’ title-winning season in 1974. I then headed over to McLaren’s famed (and much less secret) headquarters, the McLaren Technology Centre, where McLaren Heritage will be moving to next year.
Some of the brand’s greatest hits are already housed at the MTC, including the company’s 1995 Le Mans-winning F1 GTR; the prototype of its road-going offspring, the F1 LM; and yet more grand prix cars, both on the famous ‘Boulevard’ and in secret corridors hidden deep in the the building.
But as incredible as MTC is, it’s something of a known quantity, and as such it didn’t leave as much of a mark on me as the current Heritage HQ, the mythical, non-existent building that is in fact a real place.