McLaren's mighty start to 2014: nobody could foresee what happened next

The previous year had been a lean one for McLaren, our drivers Button and Checo Pérez never gracing the podium at all. That season, 2013, had been the last of the 2.4-litre V8 era, and, since 2014 would therefore be the first of the 1.6-litre hybrid V6 era, and our engine partner Mercedes had invested a huge amount of time, effort, and money into designing and producing a state-of-the-art power unit, we had reason to be optimistic about our chances of bouncing back to a state of competitiveness. Indeed, over coffees in the canteen of McLaren’s Woking factory early one February 2014 morning, Tim Goss, now chief technical officer of RB or Racing Bulls or Visa Cash App Racing Bulls F1 Team or whatever you choose to call it, but then McLaren’s technical director, said to me words that I took to heart then and I have never forgotten since: “I reckon we’ve got a chance of winning the world championship this year.” So when we flew down to Melbourne, both our drivers performed well there, we bagged a ton of points in the race, and we boarded our Qantas flight home to London in the lead of the F1 constructors’ world championship, we were feeling hugely and understandably upbeat about the races ahead.

Hindsight is a powerful thing, and it soon became clear that Goss had been wrong. But there was method behind what may, now, 11 years later, read like his madness. In February 2014 he already felt sure that the brand-new Mercedes power unit was an excellent one, and he was right about that, for Nico Rosberg won the 2014 Australian Grand Prix for Mercedes’ own F1 team, his car powered by the same 1.6-litre hybrid V6 as we had in our McLarens, and he and his Mercedes team-mate Hamilton would win a further 15 grands prix that season, setting new records for total points scored (701) and margin over second-placed team (296).

Our problem, clearly, was our chassis, about which, as the man ultimately responsible for its creation – albeit, as the head of a design committee including Matt Morris, Mark Ingham, Marcin Budkowski, and Neil Oatley – perhaps Goss was not ideally placed to be impartial. We could not even blame our underperformance on bad luck or poor reliability, for our car ended up being the most mechanically dependable of the season, clocking up 36 classified race finishes out of a possible 38. Put bluntly, and simply, the McLaren MP4-29 was not a good car.

Two weeks after our Melbourne result that had so flattered to deceive us, we were in Sepang for the Malaysian Grand Prix. There we qualified eighth (Magnussen) and 10th (Button), and finished sixth (Button) and ninth (Magnussen). Hamilton and Rosberg delivered an imperious Mercedes one-two. The following weekend we were in Bahrain, where Hamilton and Rosberg finished first and second again; we recorded a 17th-place finish (Button) and a DNF (Magnussen); and, to add insult to injury, Pérez, the driver whom we had sacked at the end of the previous year to make way for Magnussen, finished an excellent third for Force India. I was gutted about our dismal showing but I was pleased for Checo, and later that evening I congratulated him when I bumped in to him in the lobby of the Sofitel Hotel in Manama, where the McLaren and Force India teams were both staying.

“Well done, buddy,” I said.

“Thanks,” he replied, and smiled brightly.

“You must be pleased we sacked you,” I said, with what I hoped he would recognise as a rueful yet chummy grin.

I had meant my remark as a matey quip, but, as my words came out, I realised that it was the kind of rejoinder that could easily be misconstrued. But he took it the right way, I am pleased to say, for he immediately chuckled, patted me on the shoulder, then said, “F***ing right.”

In summary, 2014 was a frustrating year for us McLarenites, perhaps even a miserable one. The next few seasons would be worse still, for our engineers never really got to grips with our chassis problems and we were further handicapped by the loss of our excellent Mercedes power units, replaced as they were by Hondas that took too long to come good. I think we were to some extent blinded to our own failings by Honda’s problems with not only lack of power but also lack of reliability. Who will ever forget Alonso’s mischievous “GP2 engine” radio message at Suzuka in 2015, or indeed his roguish trackside deckchair stunt at Interlagos five weeks later?

Fluctuations in the form of top F1 teams tend to adhere to a complex cycle of development that starts with defining the problem and identifying the task – via brainstorming, researching, considering alternatives, selecting an approach, designing, engineering, testing, and evaluating – and ends with building and racing two cars. If all that has been done well, then it can turn underperformance into world championships. And McLaren is and always has been a top F1 team. It was still a top F1 team in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019, during which 118-race dry spell it never scored a single F1 podium finish; and, very obviously, it is a top F1 team now.

Despite the woeful McLaren epoch it heralded, the 2014 Australian Grand Prix will always be a special race for me. I was already very close to Kevin – even now my husband Angel sometimes describes him as “the son you never had” – and I do not think I have ever seen a driver beam more luminously on an F1 podium than he did at Albert Park that afternoon. Moreover, with a little bit of extra luck, he could have done even better. In August last year, over dinner at the upscale Copenhagen restaurant Esmée, while alongside us his wife Louise and my husband Angel were chatting animatedly about I know not what, Kevin casually dropped a bit of a bombshell.

“I could have won that race, you know?” he began.

“Really? How come?” I replied.

“Well,” he went on, “Rosberg told me a couple of years later that he had serious brake problems towards the end of that race that he thought could have ended his run.”

I wonder how differently Kevin Magnussen’s F1 career might have panned out had those Mercedes brake problems become terminal, and, as a result, had the 21-year-old Dane finished first rather than second in his very first F1 grand prix? We will never know, obviously, but I think things might have been very different for him.