MCLAREN M P4-15

Change was in the air as the MP4-15 took shape in the late summer of 1999. The ticking over of the millennium was an inescapable hard point in the calendar, the new year of all new years, a potent cocktail of hopes and dreams and promises and, yes, nagging uncertainties, what with that pesky Millennium Bug… For once, the onset of January 1 carried a wider cultural significance than a wish list of soon-to-be-abandoned resolutions.

Such ferment for radical change passed the McLaren design office by. The move to swish new premises sculpted by Norman Foster was years away, and the byzantine ‘matrix management’ system was not yet a twinkle in deputy team principal Martin Whitmarsh’s eye. If you were to visit the site where the McLaren Technology Centre stands today at the time of the MP4-15’s launch, you would find a disc of concrete peppered with steel reinforcements where the windtunnel was to be built, along with a portacabin containing samples of sanitary fittings