“The thinking behind that is to feed as much good-quality air as possible to the rear-lower mainplane and the floor of the car. “The long wheelbase and U-shaped sidepods are probably the most obvious things” explains Tim Goss. The MP4-26 features a number of distinctive features, instantly noticeable are the outboard sidepods.

The exhausts we have two concepts built and some more a little way behind, what we will end up racing I can’t tell you because we have not decided.” Many McLaren personnel at the launch hinted that the car is to feature a number of performance boosting innovations with Martin Whitmarsh saying that there were definitely some in the pipeline. On rumours that the MP4-26 would feature Renault R31 style exhausts Designer Neil Oatley added “we looked at that approach months ago but decided not to do that. The exhausts as fitted to the launch car were essentially “just so the car has exhausts” according to a team source. Other areas of the car too were unfinished or kept under wraps. For example the radiators shown off on the ‘naked’ roll out car were dummies, the definitive versions were needed in the build of the test chassis. It is one of just two teams to hold a traditional launch event (the other being Virgin) and this is the reason that the car shown was incomplete. McLaren rolled out a partially completed MP4-26 in Berlin.

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