McLaren’s iconic Formula 1 motorhome will disappear from the European paddock, instead a downsized version will be used at future races.
McLaren were the first team to introduce a motorhome to the paddock, with its three-storey Brand Centre towering over the paddock when it was introduced in 2007.
All teams have since followed, with Red Bull now taking the crown for the largest temporary structure with its impressive Holzhaus.
However McLaren’s Brand Centre will be scaled back for sustainability reasons, with team principal Andreas Seidl confirming a smaller unit would be introduced from the Monaco GP.
Gallery: F1’s motorhomes return to the paddock in Imola
The team are currently using an interim structure at this weekend’s Emilia Romagna GP.
“It’s still a work in progress on our side,” said Seidl. “The hospitality you see at the moment (see below) in the paddock for McLaren is still an interim solution which is quite cost-effective. We are planning later in the year to introduce our updated hospitality once the world is also a bit more back to normal and we are allowed to welcome guests as well.”
“In terms of the update, I don’t want to go too much into the detail, but one focus was clearly to have a solution for us in place for McLaren in the future which is much more sustainable in terms of how to transport it, how to set it up, how to use it. The clear objective is to have a more sustainable solution in place.”
The Brand Centre requires 17 trucks to transport it from race to race, but the new structure is expected to cut that figure in half.
F1 managing director of motorsport, Ross Brawn, previously suggested the sport could do away with motorhomes altogether or at least scale them back.
“We have our gin palaces with all the trucks that are needed to transport them. So in the future, we want to move to a motorhome or hospitality facility which could be put up with far less impact in terms of logistics and transportation than we have now.”
Nice cover for the fact that Zak Brown has tanked McLaren, and they are seriously financially broke. They are losing their historic car collection and the Technology Centre, so it’s no surprise to see this go as well. The truth is, Zak Brown doesn’t care about McLaren’s history outside of a very narrow spectrum of the company that he liked as a child (the few years they ran orange cars), which is not what defined the McLaren in recent decades that everyone knew, and so many loved. McLaren is now McLaren in name only. At what point do McLaren shareholders finally admit they made a mistake by booting Ron Dennis, and either beg him for forgiveness or find someone else competent enough to run McLaren?
Spot on and i’m not a McLaren fan
As I recall it, McLaren were already on the decline towards the end of Ron Dennis’s tenure, which is why he was let go and also why Hamilton left for the prospect of a potentially successful Mercedes project. Zak Brown was left with the corresponding dregs and incompentent middle management – anecdotally talked about by the people on the ground at the time. At the very least, he’s steered McLaren back on track with the appointment of Seidl. Brown might have gotten lucky with Seidl but someone had to recognise that Boullier wasn’t cutting it, which he did eventually.
McLaren’s auto division were turning profits under Ron Dennis, all the way to the end — even the F1 team was in good financial condition despite having no title sponsor and horrendous performance due to Honda. Dennis had also built a pretty stacked lineup in the F1 program that surely would have eventually resulted in something great, most who fled after he was ousted (I think Peter Prodromou might still be there).
Hamilton really had nothing to do with this. People often forget this, but he had been in a slump for years and had also become a bit of a problem child. Mercedes were the only team interested in him (who were nowhere near a top team at the time) and McLaren didn’t put much effort into retaining him. The general consensus back then was Hamilton would probably never win another title again unless a miracle happened at Mercedes, which was either going to go down really badly or really well (keep in mind they had rebuilt the team using an unconventional structure which seemed like a disaster waiting to happen with “too many cooks in the kitchen” — but Wolff was able to get rid of Brawn and obviously it worked out).
Dennis was ousted because his partnership with other major McLaren shareholder, Mansour Ojjeh, had soured, and he turned other shareholders against him. During pre-season 2012 when there was talks of the Bahrain GP being cancelled for the second year in a row, Dennis wanted to vote for the cancellation of the race (or at least have McLaren skip it), and to eliminate all Bahraini influence over McLaren with he and Ojjeh taking over the shares that Mumtalakat (Bahraini royal family) owned. The way this worked was, Dennis and Ojjeh had a pact to vote in lockstep at board meetings, which went back to 2000 when DaimlerChysler (Mercedes) purchased 40% of McLaren. Dennis was away on business, and Ojjeh was voting for him, and went against his word. Doing this allowed Ojjeh to gain more influence over Mumtalakat, and this is when McLaren started to change for the worse. Ojjeh soon was hospitalized for a lung transplant, and this is when Dennis fired Whitmarsh, an Ojjeh ally. Dennis tried to buy Ojjeh out of his shares while he was sick but obviously that never worked. His only option was to come up with billion or so dollars within a certain timeframe to outright buy McLaren — which he did in 2016 — but instead of allowing this to happen, Ojjeh and Mumtalakat ousted him before he could do it. This is when Zak Brown entered the picture and immediately erased the legacy of Ron Dennis, and tanked McLaren financially.
To give you an example of how bad things are — McLaren used to have a beautiful dealership in Beverly Hills. It resembled the McLaren Technology Centre. Since Brown took over, they are now in an old building that looks like it used to be an old concrete drive-thru car wash. It’s basically an “upscale” strip mall surrounded by industrial buildings. This would have never happened under Dennis, who oversaw the most minute details of McLaren, down to making sure the colors of the equipment castors matched everything else in the Production Centre.
Also, Boullier resigned about a year after Dennis left. Brown didn’t fire him. But you are right, hiring Seidl is by far the best decision Brown has made.