Late-'90s F1 cars rock: look at the last McLaren constructors' champion

The way that Häkkinen and Coulthard dominated that Australian Grand Prix, winning it at a canter from a front-row lockout secured with contemptuous ease the day before, beating the rest of the field by a whole lap, made abundantly and dauntingly clear that Newey had read, understood, and reacted to the latest F1 rule changes — incorporating as they did the imposition of a 200mm narrower track and the introduction of grooved tyres — better than anyone else had, and by a hefty margin. Perhaps he is busy doing exactly the same thing right now, and the Aston Martin-Honda AMR26 will be the class of the F1 field in 2026 as a result. We shall see.

The 1998 McLaren MP4-13 was an all-new car, and it looked different from and prettier than its predecessor, the MP4-12, which had been designed by Steve Nichols, Paddy Lowe, Neil Oatley, Henri Durand, Matthew Jeffreys, and quite a few others. The MP4-12 was not a bad car at all — it was raced to three F1 grand prix wins by Coulthard (two) and Häkkinen (one) in 1997 — and roughly halfway through that season it began to benefit from an ingenious, secret, and entirely legal device known as brake-steer, a Nichols brainchild. Scooped by my then colleague Darren Heath, the ace F1 photographer, and your humble correspondent, over an intensive two-week period in late September and early October, during which we barely slept in our efforts to sleuth the truth, it was controlled by a supplementary brake pedal, acting on only one of the rear wheels, thereby significantly reducing understeer on the exit of slow and medium-speed corners, making the car an average of half a second per lap faster as a result. One day I will devote an entire Motor Sport column to Heath’s and my brake-steer truth-sleuthing, about which I have never told the whole story, but this is not that column.

Even so, I will say this much. The McLaren MP4-13 started the 1998 F1 season equipped with a more sophisticated and therefore more effective version of its predecessor’s brake-steer system, and the gargantuan distance by which it defeated everything else in Albert Park in March 1998 determined that Ferrari’s head honchos would do whatever they could to persuade the FIA to ban it. So it was that Henry Peter, an eminent Swiss lawyer who specialised in corporate law and sports law, was flown by Ferrari from Geneva to São Paulo, where the second grand prix of the 1998 F1 season would take place, in an effort to assemble as much legal muscle as possible to achieve the Scuderia’s desired outcome. That effort was successful, brake-steer was outlawed by the FIA’s Interlagos race stewards, McLaren decided not to challenge their decision, and there ended a fascinating footnote to F1 history.

Nonetheless, even without brake-steer, the 1998 McLaren was a seriously competitive machine. I attended its launch, at the old McLaren factory, an unremarkable industrial unit on Woking’s Albert Drive, on February 5, 1998. It was a very small and unusually frill-free event — very different from the glitzy shindig that I and hundreds of others had enjoyed at London’s Alexandra Palace on February 13, 1997, where and when Jamiroquai and the Spice Girls had headlined the on-stage launch of the MP4-12. By contrast, from memory, a couple of dozen journalists at most attended the unveiling of the 1998 MP4-13, which was painted in logo-free orange (or papaya, in McLaren-speak) since Dennis and his commercial right-hand man, Ekrem Sami, had not yet quite finalised deals with all the sponsors whose logos would festoon its beautiful silver, white, black, and red bodywork when it was trucked down to Barcelona for the first pre-season F1 test 11 days later.

As I was driving from Woking back to London along a frosty motorway after the car’s launch, I began to think about not only what I had seen — a stunning new F1 car — but also what I had heard. And it slowly dawned on me that there had been something about Dennis’s quiet confidence that chilly February morning that had made all of us journalists feel that he was pretty damn’ sure that his new F1 car was going to be something special. Indeed, the more I thought about it, the more certain I was. So much so, in fact, that when I reached London’s south-west suburbs I stopped off at a betting shop and wagered £50 at 6/1 on Häkkinen to win the 1998 drivers’ world championship. In hindsight I wish I had been braver.

The Ferrari was more reliable than the McLaren during the 1998 F1 season, which is how the F1 drivers’ and constructors’ world championships went down to the wire in Japan, but the McLaren was the quicker of the two cars. Equally, of the two McLaren drivers, Häkkinen was the faster, which was a surprise to many observers, not least because theretofore Coulthard had been widely regarded as a rising superstar, and he had beaten Häkkinen in the previous year’s F1 drivers’ world championship, in 1997, finishing third, behind only the two Williams drivers, Jacques Villeneuve and Heinz-Harald Frentzen, whereas Häkkinen had been only sixth.

Moreover, David had won twice during that 1997 F1 season, at Albert Park and Monza, whereas Mika’s only win had come at the very end of the year, at Jerez, as a result of McLaren team orders; without that intervention from the pitwall, DC would have won that race, which victory for him would have rendered that year’s McLaren win-tally a three-nil rout in his favour.

I have often thought that there is a certain type of fast, talented, but too often too edgy driver who is extremely good at maximising the performance of a suboptimal F1 car, but often fails to monster a great F1 car to the level of consistent race-winning domination that leads to world championships. Coulthard was an example of that, I think. Another from the same era was Giancarlo Fisichella, who was brilliant in mediocre F1 cars but was comprehensively outdriven by Fernando Alonso when in 2005 and 2006 they were stablemates in a Renault F1 team whose car was capable of being driven to world championships.

I will finish with a couple of ‘anorak facts’ about the McLaren MP4-13, which won nine F1 grands prix in 1998 as well as the F1 drivers’ and constructors’ world championships that season, for it has two comparatively esoteric claims to fame that interest me and I hope will interest you. In 1999 Nick Heidfeld demo-drove an MP4-13 at the Goodwood Festival of Speed — hurling it scintillatingly flat-out alongside that famously unforgiving flint wall — recording a time of 41.6sec, which stood as the FoS record until Max Chilton stopped the Goodwood clocks at 39.08sec in an electric McMurtry Spéirling two years ago; and three years ago, in 2021, Pato O’Ward lapped Laguna Seca in an MP4-13 in 1min 10.30sec, which was a whole second quicker than he had managed in that season’s McLaren IndyCar on the same circuit earlier that year.

Late-1990s F1 cars rock, seriously.