Original subtitles

McLaren, one of the greatest teams in FORMULA ONE,

has allowed unprecedented access

throughout their 2017 pre-season.

It's a race against time to build a car...

I've never seen it as bad as this.

...for a global launch...

We will win again.

...and testing in Barcelona...

MARK TEMPLE: Drive straight out.

...with their drivers,

two-time world champion Fernando Alonso...

To win three world championships,

that's my first and only priority.

...and rookie Stoffel Vandoorne...

WOMAN: Push, push, push, push, push!

STOFFEL: It's been a dream for me to be in FORMULA ONE and to race for McLaren.

...in the most momentous pre-season in the team's history.

McLaren Racing

has been successful over 50 years.

In 1980, Ron Dennis came in as Chief Executive to this business.

Ron's contribution has been more than outstanding.

The McLaren Technology Centre is the house that Ron built.

Ron has instilled in every one of us,

the core values

and the mythology of this organisation.

McLaren is still the second most successful team in FORMULA ONE history,

behind Ferrari.

In 2012, we won seven races, 2013 we won none,

and it's been a lean period since then.

JONATHAN: In 2015,

McLaren formed the partnership with Honda

to give us that championship-winning status.

JOHN: Ron said to me once,

there is a budget to compete in FORMULA ONE,

which typically can be anywhere around £90 million

and to be competitive in FORMULA ONE

is about another £100 million on top of that.

REPORTER: There has been a poisonous boardroom situation for some months now.

Mr Dennis, at the moment, is on gardening leave.

Those close to him tell me

he's taken this pretty badly, indeed.

He feels he's been betrayed by his own family as it were.

Something potentially of a power vacuum,

at the moment, at this team.

The board does not renew Ron Dennis's contract with McLaren.

After 37 years, he is out.

David, if you could bring everything up to my office,

cos I'm gonna change out of these clothes.

In a change from the past,

the day-to-day running of McLaren

will no longer be by one man,

but by a team of three executives

working under the shareholders.

We finished at 3:30 last night.

ZAK BROWN: Really? -3:30.

JONATHAN: Great support from...

Shaikh Mohammed and Mansour all through, which is good.

-Yeah.

Constantly available, which is good. Yeah.

JONATHAN: Zak brings a wealth of experience, commercially, in FORMULA ONE.

He's been the go-to guy for sponsorship for

many of the FORMULA ONE teams for over a decade.

He's a former race driver, he's been a fan of McLaren,

and he complements us as a team.

ZAK: There's been something like 120 race teams

in the last 30-plus years that have come and gone,

so it's an expensive sport.

If you don't have a lot of backing, you can go bust.

Jonathan and I are attached at the hip.

He's more technical, I'm more commercial.

Eric runs the racing team.

His primary responsibility is

to get the most out of the drivers.

Ca va bien?

ALONSO: What I want to achieve now is a third World Championship.

To win three World Championships will mean that

you win the same of Ayrton, first of all,

and then, on the personal side,

after difficult years and difficult seasons,

if you...go through those moments and you win it,

I think a third World Championship

will have more value for me on the personal side

than the first and the second.

-See you later. ALONSO: Ciao.

Every year, each FORMULA ONE team builds a new car.

This year's McLaren MCL32

will be built with 13,500 brand-new parts,

each of which is meticulously designed and fabricated.

The first two or three days are always quite difficult,

because it's when we find out what shortages we've got,

what parts we need.

It just gets very frustrating. You're trying to build a car

and there's one bit that'll be stopping you.

You need to juggle those parts.

STOFFEL: First day at McLaren as official race driver.

I know it's one of the nicest buildings in FORMULA ONE.

And you know when you walk along the boulevard

with all the historic cars here,

it's a very special feeling.

Hopefully, one day my car will be here as well.

It's seat fitting,

getting the first impressions of next year's car.

I always like seat-fit day.

Feels like it's all starting again.

-It's good.

Only three more months to go before...

...before getting in the car, so...

People always say, "Oh, you must be on holiday,

because the season's finished."

But for design, we're flat out

from September to February, really.

MATT BISHOP: Do you remember how it all started?

-2010, so you were-- -11.

No, no, no, 2010.

-The very first-- -11.

-No, 2010. -11.

No, 2011 is when you first went to the race.

-Yes. -The Nurburgring Grand Prix.

-Yes.

-Yes, yes. Oh, yeah, 2010. -Yes, thank you!

MATT BISHOP: I met Stoffel five years ago.

COMMENTATOR: So, Stoffel Vandoorne

takes the race win with a blinding drive.

COMMENTATOR 2: The 20-year-old Belgian

produced a fantastic start,

as he overtook ten opponents.

MATT BISHOP: He has won in six separate categories

prior to FORMULA ONE,

and I was very proud to be able to introduce him

to Ron Dennis.

How well he will do this year,

is not down to him, it's down to us.

If we give him a car good enough, he'll do good enough.

What do we have in terms of spacer? Nothing now.

SCOTT BAIN: There is your, just,

the same spacer that you've got on it currently.

Is it possible to have a medium spacer?

Yes.

I think Fernando's is too much...

-Yeah. -...but like

-OK.

There's a 5mm in there at the moment.

-Yeah. -And what...

-Fernando's is...

-32. -32mm.

-Not great. -Right, try that there.

Yeah. It's OK.

-Yeah.

-OK. That's fine.

SCOTT: If you're driving

and you can constantly feel something niggling,

you're, kind of, "Ooh!" all the time.

You're gonna be pulling off the gas,

you're gonna be lifting earlier,

you're not gonna be concentrating on

taking that corner at exactly the right point.

You're gonna be in discomfort.

So, getting that environment right

and getting the driver happy

so that he's not worried about anything in that zone,

he can concentrate on what he actually needs to do.

Hungry, eh

MATT WELLS: The part of the seat fit we start with is

making sure you get the head position in the right place,

to make sure they can see.

We spend a lot of time trying to reduce head position for

reduction in aerodynamic drag and reduction of

the whole centre of gravity of the driver.

Once you've got his head in the right place,

then, depending on how tall he is,

that really sets his pedal position.

Normally, as soon as your heel loses pressure, you'll lose control

and then you start getting oscillations.

Following that, we go through and check things like clearance,

for elbow clearance and knuckle clearance.

Once you have those key areas,

you can start looking at the seat

and you can mould the seat around him.

Scott. Scott.

How many years have you been doing seat fits?

While Stoffel has his seat fit,

the car's colour scheme and design, or livery,

is currently being worked on by the marketing department.

Ron Dennis was known for his orderly leadership of McLaren.

The team's liveries projected those principles

with clean monochromatic lines

that looked to the future.

The 2017 season was clearly a kind of a marker,

a line in the sand...

at which we wanted to message to the world

that something different was going on at McLaren.

One of the key ways we can do that

is to show a new livery, a new look for the team,

that references some of our heritage.

I zeroed in on the colour orange as being critical in our history,

but nonetheless shows a completely new look and feel,

and a spirit that we see in the team for 2017.

The dramatic unveil for you now, erm...

So this is the 2012 car with the new livery on it.

MOHAMMED: I think...

matte to gloss makes the orange pop out more.

Yeah, it does and I think we can put a tiny bit of metallic flake in there, too.

OK.

So, effectively, this is a giant,

a giant sort of speedmark logo wrapped round.

-That's where we've got to. -Fantastic

JOHN: But I think it's gonna be pretty sexy

by the time we're running it for real.

MOHAMMED: McLaren has a rich, rich history,

and this is a new chapter and we're all...

well, everyone the whole team, is working very hard.

We wanna get on with writing it.

Yeah, exactly. It's good.

-Great. That was fruitful. -OK, take care.

-Thank you. -Thank you, everyone.

Cheers, Mohammed, good to see you.

Thanks.

The design department will now mock up last year's car

to demonstrate the full impact of the new livery.

STOFFEL: You actually work very closely with your engineers.

My engineer, Tom, we started working very intensely together,

spent a lot of time in the factory and started preparing for next year.

The race engineer's the driver's number-one

technical point of contact at the company.

So, every time he wants to know what upgrades are coming,

how we're going to use them,

what we're going to do with our strategy,

then that goes though me to Stoffel.

DAREN STANLEY: Click on "Steering Wheel", it'll tell you what all the buttons do.

You can go through and read in detail what they all do.

But the main one, probably, for you is

to go down to the bottom,

and click on this one called "Interactive".

Then click on the buttons and it'll tell you what the button does.

STOFFEL: Uh-huh. Fast!

DAREN: Yeah. And also it's got...

Where possible it's got the light display.

-Ah, yeah. TOM: It isn't to say this is what you have to have.

This is what we have now, and if you get back to us,

we can change pretty much anything.

But it's yours now, so this is just the start point.

That's how you should think of it.

DAREN: Right, we'd better dash or we'll be late.

Hello, we're just coming.

TOM STALLARD: The simulator's used almost entirely for

car preparation rather than driver preparation.

And you're good to go.

TOM: Basically, a computer programme that

models exactly how the car moves.

TOM: It's got a full model of the aerodynamics of the car

that's developed from the wind tunnel.

TOM: You get a feel from watching the data of

how he's driving, how things are going.

STOFFEL: From a technical point of view,

I know everything about the cars,

how they're put together, how you need to set them up.

TOM: We've had a fairly reasonable day today, in the simulator.

We've mainly been looking at front and rear stiffness.

You can see some data up there.

That's the fastest lap of the day,

which was a 1:19.97,

so we just dipped under 1:20 which was nice.

STOFFEL: Since the first run this morning,

it felt like the car was much more on the edge than...

than the previous time.

We are lacking a bit of rear... rear stability.

STOFFEL: FORMULA ONE is the big step up.

You know, you are working with so many people.

It's suddenly very different working with

a whole factory behind you,

because you have a massive influence on car development.

Yeah, if you turn in a bit too aggressive sometimes

with light brake pressure,

the car sometimes just comes around.

TOM: A comment you often hear a driver say is that

it feels like the car is falling over at the rear,

and when you look in the data,

it's rolled by an extra 0.1, 0.2 degrees

and you think, "Oh, that can't be what he's feeling", but, sure enough, it is.

When you dig into it, he's feeling incredibly small movements in the car,

so a very unusual level of sensitivity.

Just as football sponsors pay big money

for prominent space on a team's shirts,

title sponsors do the same in FORMULA ONE.

Advertising space on a car can be sold to sponsors

for anything up to $100 million a year.

McLaren hasn't had a title sponsor since 2013,

reportedly costing the team $200 million in potential revenue.

-Hello. -Hello, there.

-That's a big change. -That's different. Cool.

It's crucial that Executive Director Zak Brown

is happy with the new livery.

It's his job to sell space on the new car.

ERIC: The matte is brilliant.

Thank you, mate.

That's why I was asking.

JONATHAN: So, Zak, for you, then, the issue is colour scheme on branding?

I really don't want any black on the car here.

No, it's a perception issue,

and the right people to do that are you, John Allert and you guys.

You know, you're the... you're the brand and the image people.

ZAK: OK. All-righty back to work.

ZAK: Sponsorship probably accounts for about half your budget.

North of 100 million is the type of sponsorship dollars

that you need to bring in, to be at the front of the field.

That's an area that we have fallen behind in,

so I think that was certainly right at the top of the list

of "What can Zak bring to the table?"

If you look at who wins races,

it's the biggest spenders in the sport.

So, if we don't bring in more sponsorship then, ultimately,

that will compromise our on-track success.

ZAK: Today, we're celebrating our partnership with Richard Mille,

who's just developed and launched

a beautiful special edition McLaren watch.

A million euros for those of you that would like to purchase one.

It's something that the drivers will wear when they're racing,

so it's gonna be on them all of the time.

It's not something that they're gonna use on an occasional basis.

VICTORIA ROWLEY: So are you quite happy with

all of the information I sent in terms, like,

about the partnership, about the watch?

STOFFEL: Yeah. -Erm...

-I've seen the price of it.

-I've seen it.

JOHN: Stoffel is savvy enough now to realise that

there is no such thing as just driving a car.

The more really rich partnerships you can forge with big brands,

the more money we've got to make a fast car

and someone like Stoffel just wants a fast car.

Bonjour, Stoffel. Tu vas bien?

-Tutto bene.

Regarde ta voiture.

-His car. -You're a Grand Prix driver,

you don't even have to dress fancy anymore.

Exactly. No suits.

RICHARD MILLE: It's a long-term relationship

because we signed a ten-years contract.

So, it's a relationship that will be year after year re-enforced, I'm sure.

The multi-million dollar Richard Mille sponsorship deal

will help drive forward McLaren's ambitions.

But Zak still has to find a title sponsor.

ZAK: The benefit of getting someone like Stoffel early on,

is you can mould him,

which gives you a little bit of a chance

to try and make him a McLaren man.

As part of creating a brand around Stoffel,

the marketing team must present their new McLaren man

to the world's media.

CHARLOTTE SEFTON: We've basically worked out his schedule

between now and Australia, and there are zero days,

so we've crammed in as much media as we can.

Well, come on, then. Come on, then!

(STOFFEL SIGHS, AMANDA CHUCKLES)

Your official title now is driver, not reserve driver.

Who was the first person you then told?

Erm...I probably told my mum first and my dad.

So, yeah, I think they've been very supportive of me

in the past and, yeah, to inform them first was

was, kind of, the logical thing to do, for me.

Does it add to the pressure the fact that

you are not just gonna have to prove yourself

in your first season in FORMULA ONE,

but the fact that you're driving against Fernando in the same car?

Fernando, Lewis, these are the kinds of people

who in essence have the licence to be more authentic

and a little bit more edgy in the way they communicate

with the rest of the world.

What's your relationship like with Fernando?

I have a very good relationship with Fernando.

Yeah, I mean, I get on very well with Fernando.

JOHN: I think younger drivers,

the likes of Stoffel,

are quite sensibly staying reasonably cautious

in just how flamboyant they are trying to be as characters.

I'm obviously very happy to join McLaren Honda.

For me it it's always been a bit of a dream

to race for McLaren.

You know, it's always been a dream for me to be in FORMULA ONE.

CHARLOTTE: Six minutes, six minutes.

Fernando Alonso is a double world champion.

Fernando is a double world champion.

A great benchmark for me.

A very good benchmark next to me.

-Excellent. -Good. Cheers.

-Awesome, thank you so much. -Cheers. No worries. Thanks.

AMANDA: Stoffel is an older young driver, isn't he? I think 24.

So Stoffel has been around

and he's had to answer those questions in recent years. "Is it too late?

Are you too old to be given your break?"

And a lot of people would have given up on their dream.

I don't know what his prospects are.

It's gonna be tough.

I think the big challenge for Stoffel is

he's got to be seen to be giving Fernando a run for his money,

because if Fernando outraces him, out-qualifies him,

then it's hard to argue that he deserves his place.

PHOTOGRAPHER: Brilliant.

OK, then we go back. We have another three.

So last group for the three, two, ones.

You can decide however you want to use your 15 minutes, guys.

PETER: Perfect. -It's up to you.

We found in our archives the very first article of you.

-Look at you. My dream!

STOFFEL: Oh, yes, I remember it.

It was your father who came every week to the newspapers,

-"Look what my son has done." STOFFEL: Oh, really?

"Publish it, publish it." So every week he was there.

-From your father.

My dad. I didn't remember it was my dad.

Yeah. Just look at it, guys.

A bit younger, plenty of talent.

STOFFEL: A bit chubby.

Beginnings.

Everything has a beginning.

:

STOFFEL: I was about six years old, I think.

Back then, I was just obsessed with everything that had competition in it.

I just wanted to compete.

That's where I found a way to actually do that every evening.

STOFFEL: Deep down, I wanted to be a FORMULA ONE driver,

but it seemed just so far away.

Maybe something impossible.

When you start racing,

you never know if you're gonna get there, yes or no.

JONATHAN: I just saw the car in this blizzard of debris.

I thought I was going in to lock everything down.

I thought it was at that moment where we got a really big one here.

And we're gonna have to freeze data for...

You know, just horrific.