GRAND PRIX Driver

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...

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...

Push, push, push, push, push!

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.

In 2015,

McLaren formed the partnership with Honda

to give us that championship-winning status.

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.

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.

Really? -3:30.

Great support from...

Shaikh Mohammed and Mansour all through, which is good.

-They were on speed dial? -Yeah.

Constantly available, which is good. Yeah.

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.

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?

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. 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.

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.

-(LAUGHTER) -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.

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. -Do you remember?

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

I met Stoffel five years ago.

So, Stoffel Vandoorne

takes the race win with a blinding drive.

The 20-year-old Belgian

produced a fantastic start,

as he overtook ten opponents.

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.

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

-something in-between? -OK.

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

-Yeah. -And what...

-Fernando's is, like, 50mm? -Fernando's is...

-32. -32mm.

-Not great. -Right, try that there.

Yeah. It's OK.

-About 10? -Yeah.

-OK. -Yeah? That's fine.

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? (LAUGHS)

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.

I think...