Game of inches
‘Game of inches’ is a famous phrase attributed to Green Bay Packers American Football team coach, Vince Lombardi, immortalised by Al Pacino in the film Any Given Sunday.
A ‘game of inches’ justifies why the smallest detail matters. Like American Football, Formula 1 is, too, a game of inches, as the difference between raising a championship banner and being considered a failure is often the smallest margin.
Although in contemporary Formula 1 Mercedes’ domination seems insurmountable, the margins in 2020 have been tighter than many years before, with outright performance of all 20 cars on the grid falling within a delta of around 3.4 per cent between the best and worst. Some teams in the so-called midfield fall within less than 0.75 per cent of their closest rivals. As such, should a team’s nominal performance fall to 99.24 per cent of its target pace, there’s another team there to take advantage of that infinitesimally small error.
And such was the fortune of the McLaren Renault team who, at the very last race of the season in Abu Dhabi, clinched third place in the constructors’ championship, beating Racing Point BWT Mercedes by just seven points. The battle for this position behind world champions, Mercedes Petronas AMG, and Red Bull Racing Honda has been one hard fought for the entirety of the 2020 season.
McLaren Renault’s apparent game of inches approach has been well documented in 2020, that being a step away from where they were just a few years ago.
Starting gate
When it comes to the design philosophy of contemporary Formula 1 cars, the road the Mercedes Grand Prix team took a few years ago has become more of a highway with many other teams on the grid adopting
