The Breakup of Mercedes-Benz and McLaren
When Mercedes-Benz decided to enter Formula One in 1995, they couldn’t have picked a better partner than McLaren. The two worked together to create race cars that excelled on the track, and in their glory days (1998-1999) proved a veritable threat against Ferrari, BMW and others. But McLaren had an advantage of which Williams and Sauber did not have – they had the experience in building road vehicles, which came in handy when Mercedes-Benz wanted to build a real-world supercar, the SLR. Up until the introduction of the Bugatti Veyron, it was the McLaren F1 road car that held the title of world’s fastest car.
The news of the breakup of Mercedes-Benz and McLaren off the track comes as a big surprise. Less than a month ago, the two pulled the wraps off the open-top version of the SLR. Various sources reported that Mercedes was working on another project featuring a mid-engine layout, while others speculated that the German brand was contemplating buying McLaren outright. However, if Automotive News is correct, the purchase won’t happen, and if the mid-engine supercar is built, it won’t have both names written across the tail. It is speculated that Mercedes-Benz was unhappy with the way that the SLR’s performance figures turned out (despite being very good, especially in 722 form), and that given the financial investment in the project, the SLR could’ve turned out better. There is a bit of truth to the argument, given that there are growing numbers of vehicles that not only cost less than the SLR, but are capable of out-accelerating it.
Of course, Mercedes will still want to build its world-dominating supercars, but who’s going to step into help them? The answer looks to be HWA, the racing subsidiary of AMG. HWA is the current partner to the Mercedes-Benz DTM team, engineering and building the C-Class racer, plus they built the ill-fated CLR Le Mans race car. The team also has a little bit of experience tuning Mercedes-Benz road cars, with engine transplants and high-performance derivatives. HWA looks to be a viable contender, as it recently announced that it will be tripling the size of its factories, the sort of changes that would be undertaken to produce a vehicle.
The next supercar that Mercedes will build will take a different path from the current SLR. Even though it will be badged as an AMG product, the car will be a proper HWA racing vehicle tuned for the street, with a racing derivative. It will also look different from the SLR. The long nose front might’ve looked good to some, and shared a striking resemblance to Mercedes-McLaren’s Formula One racer, but it’ll be gone with the new car. Instead of having the engine mounted up front, the forthcoming supercar will most likely be a mid-engined vehicle, and will probably be powered by a heavily modified version of the AMG 6.2-litre (called 6.3-litre) engine.
Just how this change in direction will affect the McLaren-Mercedes F1 racing team is anyone’s guess. Being that Mercedes builds the engines through Mercedes-Benz High Performance Engines Ltd. (previously Ilmore of Brixworth, Northamptonshire, England), and the cars are more or less built by McLaren, with engineering assistance by M-B, anything could happen. Just the same, money is the most critical component for success in F1 and Mercedes has a lot of it, so now the team is extremely successful, leading the championship with two top-tier drivers, don’t expect too many changes when it comes to the two companies’ motorsport efforts anytime soon.