McLaren - History and Development

HistoryF1 RulesF1 2022 season

Scoring third in 2020 and despite losing the fight for third place in the constructor's championship against Ferrari in the last race in 2021, McLaren is definitely one of the top-teams in modern .

McLaren Racing is a company based in Woking, Surrey (UK), employing about 4,200 people. Zak Brown has been CEO since November 2016, Andreas Seidl was appointed the role of Team Principal (a German engineer and manager) at the start of May 2019.

Apart from the engagement in Formula 1 since the Monaco GP 1966, McLaren Racing recently entered Extreme E, an electric off-road racing series and takes part of the IndyCar Series since 2020, collaborating with Arrow Schmidt Peterson Motorsports in the latter.
Until 1974, McLaren became the most successful constructor in the Can-Am championship, before it ceased at the end of the season.

In summary, Mclaren has been taking part of several motorsport series for more than 50 years, and has announced to look into the specifications of new competitions like Formula E and potentially the FIA World Endurance Championship, the latter starting from 2024. Most of the series have been sanctioned by the FIA.

Read more about the History of McLaren Racing or continue with McLaren's current success in the 2022 season.

Relevance

But why is McLaren Racing interesting? On the one hand, Mclaren belongs to the top-teams in Formula One and has taken part in the championship continuously since 1966, which makes it the team with the second-longest history in Formula One, only Ferrari have taken part in every single season since 1950. This is, although F1 is a very challenging sport, with the whole on-site staff and equipment having to travel every second week to another country, mostly even on another continent, and the extremely high costs of developing and building F1 cars. McLaren has experienced highs and lows during its 56 years of Formula One, but they have not missed a single season. The history, how Bruce McLaren built a racing team that would claim 8 Constructors' and 12 Drivers' Championships in Formula One alone, and the issues the team had to deal with will always be one of the greatest histories in modern sport.
Lastly, the history is interesting because currently, the McLaren team are "best of the rest" (fourth in the Constructors' Championship) and as such one of the most interesting teams as they are always balancing between the top three and all other slower teams.

The 2022 McLaren during official pre-season testing in Bahrain.

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Source: McLaren Racing (March 11, 2022)

Render of the 2022 McLaren F1-car

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Source: Formula 1 (July 16, 2021)

The McLaren 2020 IndyCar: Arrow McLaren SP Car

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Source: McLaren Technology Group (February 7, 2020)