McLaren’s Outdated Wind Tunnel Caused Carp To Breed Out Of Control, Former Engineer Reveals

Former McLaren engineer Mark Slade has lifted the lid on one of the more bizarre chapters in the team’s troubled mid-2000s history.
Slade, who joined McLaren in 1991 as assistant race engineer to Martin Brundle, went on to become one of the team’s most experienced trackside figures over nearly two decades.
He served as race engineer to Mika Hakkinen during his two consecutive world championship victories before working with Kimi Raikkonen, Fernando Alonso, and Heikki Kovalainen before departing for Renault in 2010.
Speaking with F1 journalist and former team manager Peter Windsor on YouTube, Slade opened up about the McLaren Technology Centre, which opened in 2004.
He revealed that the MTC’s construction became extraordinarily expensive due to the waterlogged ground on which it was built, leaving the team financially stretched.
As a result, McLaren opted to use a wind tunnel that had originally been designed for a factory project at Lyden Hill, which never actually came to fruition, and had been sitting in storage since around 1991.
“So that wind tunnel they spent a lot of money on designing and they actually built it and then it was put in storage because they didn’t have anywhere to install it,” said Slade.
He added: “I just don’t think despite McLaren being McLaren at that time, didn’t have the money to build a bigger one.”
The consequences of relying on such an outdated piece of equipment extended far beyond aerodynamic limitations, with warm water discharged by the tunnel flowing into a lake on the MTC grounds stocked with carp by Ron Dennis.
Carp naturally breed when water temperatures rise to a certain level, and the permanently warm discharge from the wind tunnel kept the lake at precisely that breeding temperature all year round.
“The problem at MTC was that the warm water coming out of the wind tunnel was always at that temperature,” Slade explained, “so the fish were breeding like buggery and they used to actually have to get people to come along and take fish out because there were so many of these bloody fish in the lake.”
The unusual situation did not stop there, with algae growth on the lake’s sides also causing problems by disrupting the cooling system, requiring workers to wade in with wellington boots and wheelbarrows to clean it out.
Slade also noted that Ron Dennis employed people to turn pebbles over along the MTC walkways to keep their clean side facing up, before a dedicated pebble washer was eventually brought in to clean them properly.
Reflecting on the broader picture, Slade was candid about where he felt responsibility lay for McLaren’s slide toward the back of the grid by 2015, when the team finished second from last in the constructors’ standings.
“It came down to money and not investing in the right things, I’ll be honest,” said Slade. “I have huge respect for Ron for what he achieved, but I would say that in the 2000s and onwards, big mistakes started to be made in terms of priorities and that led to the disaster that McLaren was by the mid sort of 2014/’15/’16.”
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