FALL THE HISTORY OF MCLAREN FROM CHAPTER 6: 2013-2019 GRACE
This is not how our celebration of the McLaren Formula 1 team’s magnificent history should wrap up. But the reality is brutal. This final chapter is the first in our six-part series to feature not a single grand prix victory, never mind a tilt for a world title. It is a sorry tale of a team in decline, of monumentally wasted opportunity and the ultimate estrangement of the man who was the spark for some of the sport’s greatest happenings. But does it also represent a possible ending for one of the greatest of F1 epics? This we cannot know.
Flick back 10 years and nobody could have predicted how hard McLaren’s F1 fall would be. At the start of 2009, the team’s mercurial young star Lewis Hamilton was riding high off the back of his first world championship. Sure, he’d needed a huge dose of Timo Glock-flavoured luck to secure it, but after all his team had been through this was vindication. McLaren had ploughed through its darkest chapter since the death of founder Bruce nearly 40 years earlier. The 2007 ‘Spygate’ saga [involving confidential Ferrari documents], an eye-watering $100 million fine from a vindictive governing body, further financial loss from humiliating
