McLaren

Mclaren is taken legal action against HUSKI(???) CHOCOLATE because it still owes Mclaren $5 million USD for 2019.

 

My understanding is that McLaren has already partially recovered the promised money ($5 millions was the whole sponsorship amount) but will probably never see the missing amount (about $1.2 million) because the mother company of Huski Chocolate went bankrupt.

 

I was curious about what financial package Piastri was offered:

--Piastri was signed up to a new McLaren contract which reportedly put him on level terms with Norris’ salary ahead of the 2025 F1 season.

 

Go Lando lol! Must be a race weekend!

Norris: McLaren the only team with two good drivers right now

https://www.the-race.com/formula-1/norris-mclaren-only-f1-team-with-two-good-drivers-right-now/

 

McLaren Racing takes on new co-ownership with immediate effect
18:56, 03 APR
byLudo van Denderen
CYVN Holdings has completed the acquisition of McLaren Automotive from Bahrain Mumtalakat Holding Company, with the Abu Dhabi-based investment company also taking a minority stake in McLaren Racing.

It means fresh investment and a new co-owner of the company that holds McLaren's Formula 1, Formula E and IndyCar outfits under its wing.

The activities of the racing arm remain unchanged and continue to operate completely independently of the McLaren Automotive business. Mumtalakat Holdings therefore remains a major shareholder, Paul Walsh remains executive chairman and Zak Brown CEO of McLaren Racing.

 

Exclusive: McLaren plots reinvention in full merger with Forseven
Full interview with CEO as British firm sets its sights on dramatic expansion beyond mid-engined supercars
Exclusive: McLaren plots reinvention in full merger with Forseven | Autocar

McLaren Automotive is to merge with the start-up company Forseven in a bombshell move that will enable McLaren to expand beyond making mid-engined supercars for the first time.

The move secures the future of McLaren, giving it the capital, technology and resources to go into areas of the market it has not been able to finance itself.

Forseven is a British start-up that has been quietly assembling a team of more than 700 industry professionals, among them big-name designers, engineers and executives from rival British car companies, and has been building towards the launch of a range of luxury models under a new brand.



The common link between the two companies is the Abu Dhabi government-backed investment company CYVN Holdings, which has facilitated a merger operating under the McLaren Automotive name that will enable the models in development at Forseven to come to market under the McLaren badge.

This gives Forseven a shortcut to market, and McLaren the expansion and security it craves and the ability to better compete with the likes of Ferrari, Lamborghini, Aston Martin and Bentley.

The official announcement confirms an Autocar story from February, which revealed a merger was being planned between McLaren Automotive and Forseven to enable McLaren to expand beyond its range of supercars.

The new combined company, McLaren Group Holdings, will be led by Forseven CEO Nick Collins who – in his only interview with an automotive title – told Autocar that “we’re about to embark on the most exciting British automotive story in decades”.

Collins was previously a senior engineer at Ford and latterly JLR, where he oversaw the likes of the Defender and Range Rover.

The Forseven name had never been intended as a customer-facing brand, and will cease to exist.

“It’s just a holding name, and we’ve been building at an incredible pace,” said Collins, who took up the role of Forseven CEO in January last year.
The first official details of the new-era McLarens will be revealed later this year, with Collins promising “a bigger-bang event” that goes beyond this initial corporate announcement.


In the meantime, the company says work will "commence immediately" on a six-month turnaround of the existing McLaren Automotive business.
He declined to go into specifics in terms of any of the models planned but confirmed it was a range of cars in the luxury market at higher price points, which would make for a broader portfolio of McLaren models than exists today. Our artist’s renderings accompanying this story imagine what some of those cars might look like.

“It’s not as challenging as you think to explore how the design language of this brand [McLaren] could evolve in the future and still maintain everything that they’ve already done and a lot more,” said Collins.





Before Collins arrived at Forseven in January 2024, design models and feasibility studies for models had been created but “we have evolved a long way since then
The design team is made up of around 50 people and Collins said their output was “staggering” over the past 12 months, with virtual reality being used alongside physical models to allow design work to take place 24/7 with a further team based in Australia alongside the UK operation.

“They’re really looking into the fundamental building blocks of British design,” he said. “There are some amazingly consistent elements of British design, and particularly British luxury design, that permeate British brands. We’ve taken that, plus some McLaren influence, into where we’re going to go.”

Prior to the McLaren deal, it had been Forseven’s intention to go to market as its own brand, albeit not called Forseven, and it had been working on different brands and names.



Intriguingly, the models that have been in creation at Forseven are not solely electric (an easy assumption to make, given its website URL is forseven-ev.com) and McLaren’s expansion into other segments will include high-performance internal combustion engines.

Collins said: “The future of propulsion is multi-propulsion. The more luxurious the vehicle gets, the better electric is for it because it’s quieter, more refined. So it will play a role.




“We genuinely think you can make a brilliant electric car in certain segments, but through the way the world is transiting at different paces in different parts of the world, we will have different propulsion technologies to allow us to grow in the right way.”

Another one of CYVN’s investments is in Chinese electric car maker Nio. Collins said a technology licence existed between Forseven and Nio “that we have incorporated into the cars” but it was for specific “technology chunks” rather than for an architecture on which to base the cars as buying in architectures was “the graveyard of car projects”.

“We’ll be deploying [the technology] in a very unique way that’s specific to what we’re trying to achieve; think of it as an accelerator to what we do,” said Collins.

Based on that description, examples of the technology that Forseven could use from Nio for future McLarens are its autonomous driving features and its battery-swapping technology for electric cars. And when it comes to architectures, McLaren’s experience in composites is likely to come into play.

CYVN has also acquired Gordon Murray Technologies, which includes the rights for the iStream manufacturing process. This process is more cost effective than traditional manufacturing and allows for lighter vehicle weight. Collins said “the spirit” of the process would be used for production in the future and “research projects are ongoing” to that end.


“We genuinely think you can make a brilliant electric car in certain segments, but through the way the world is transiting at different paces in different parts of the world, we will have different propulsion technologies to allow us to grow in the right way.”

Another one of CYVN’s investments is in Chinese electric car maker Nio. Collins said a technology licence existed between Forseven and Nio “that we have incorporated into the cars” but it was for specific “technology chunks” rather than for an architecture on which to base the cars as buying in architectures was “the graveyard of car projects”.

“We’ll be deploying [the technology] in a very unique way that’s specific to what we’re trying to achieve; think of it as an accelerator to what we do,” said Collins.

Based on that description, examples of the technology that Forseven could use from Nio for future McLarens are its autonomous driving features and its battery-swapping technology for electric cars. And when it comes to architectures, McLaren’s experience in composites is likely to come into play.

CYVN has also acquired Gordon Murray Technologies, which includes the rights for the iStream manufacturing process. This process is more cost effective than traditional manufacturing and allows for lighter vehicle weight. Collins said “the spirit” of the process would be used for production in the future and “research projects are ongoing” to that end.

 

Assessment of why Mclaren is holding an advantage currently

Where McLaren's biggest F1 2025 strength is really coming from
https://www.the-race.com/formula-1/mclaren-2025-f1-car-advantage-theories/

 

What McLaren is noticing about Norris's errors in 2025
https://www.the-race.com/formula-1/mclaren-noticing-more-clearly-what-lando-norris-is-getting-wrong/
Apr 20, 2025
by Scott Mitchell-Malm

Lando Norris's costly qualifying crash at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix is another "episode" in getting caught out by McLaren's Formula 1 car at the limit.

After topping practice and looking the favourite for pole, Norris has made his Jeddah race much trickier than it should be by crashing in the first sector on his first run in Q3.

He will start 10th, with Max Verstappen on pole and Norris's McLaren team-mate and main championship rival Oscar Piastri in second.

Norris admitted after qualifying he "shouldn't be taking any silly risks like I seem to have done", but believed it was a different situation to his previous disappointment just a week ago in Bahrain, where Norris heavily criticised his own performance and driving.

"This has got nothing to do with it, this is just a separate mistake," Norris said in Jeddah.

While the circumstances of this corner entry misjudgement were different to Bahrain, where Norris struggled against Piastri and had some style incompatibilities with the 2025 McLaren exposed, team boss Andrea Stella indicated there is a connection in how Norris is performing at the limit.

"It was all ready for a very strong weekend, but I think in Q3, when Lando tries to squeeze a few more milliseconds out of the car, what we see - and I think we are starting to see this even better in the data, in terms of identification of what is going on - the car doesn't respond as he expects," said Stella.

"This is a behaviour that kind of surprises him.

"In a way it's almost quite episodical. What's happening is an episode, and it's an episode that I think starts from some of the work that we have done on the car.

"It made the car faster overall, but I think it took something away from Lando in terms of predictability of the car once he pushes the car at the limit."

This is tied to the well-established characteristics of the McLaren, which since testing has been very quick but capable of catching its drivers out.
Norris seems more prone to this, partly because his driving style of holding a higher minimum speed through the corner asks more of the car and can induce problems, and partly because he seems to be feeling and judging the limit of the car less effectively than Piastri.

Stella said the responsibility in mitigating this is partly on the team, to produce a car that gives Norris the confidence and comfort he needs, but also on Norris to be able to adapt. Stella compared it to Lewis Hamilton talking about adjusting his preferred driving style to suit his new Ferrari - and said that in qualifying, this kind of conscious thought is a bad fit.

"These cars are so fast, they are so demanding in terms of just adopting a very natural driving style," said Stella.

"Because these cars are too fast to think; you either kind of get what you anticipate from the car, or you're going to be slow. And Lando doesn't accept to be slow."

The implication is that Norris's disconnect with the McLaren has effectively left him error-prone in key moments, even though the errors are quite small, like taking slightly too much speed into a corner or not lining up his braking and steering lock as precisely as needed.

And as a result, the McLaren is biting him more - because, Stella said, it has a tendency to lose grip very suddenly, presumably at a point that Piastri doesn't bring the car to as much as Norris.

His example was that if the driver pushes one metre later on the brakes, or is 1km/h faster mid-corner, the car reacts in a way the driver does not anticipate and leaves them "a bit of a passenger". And he revealed that this is partly because the car does not give the drivers great feedback and this leaves them slightly guessing what it will do.
Asked by The Race if the trend McLaren is observing with Norris's Q3 struggles is a broad one of small imprecisions in different ways, or if something specific is connecting them, Stella said: "The car has a certain envelope of performance. But the way you exploit this envelope is a little tricky for our drivers.

"There's a lot of grip, there's a lot of grip, [then] grip disappears. You go 1km/h faster and the grip disappears.

"This transition seems to be quite sharp, and the feedback you receive from the car in terms of understanding and leaning on this limit is relatively numb.

"I think that's where the drivers almost have to use a lot of guessing as to how the car will behave and there's not much information and cueing coming from the car.

"That's what we are struggling a bit from a team point of view [with], in terms of achieving what we want in designing a car that provides this kind of feedback to drivers, and what the drivers may struggle [with] on their side because they need to use quite a lot of guessing as to what the car will be doing.

"You see that every session, when we sort of push 99%, we seem to be having a decent competitiveness.

"But when it's the time to have that final one tenth of a second, then it gets pretty tricky to go and materialise it."

McLaren may be able to rectify this during the season with improvements to its car but until that proves possible Norris may need to stop himself chasing the final few milliseconds of laptime - at least on tracks like Jeddah, where the reward of achieving that is great but the risk of getting it wrong is extremely costly.

 

Norris is all talk and can't back any of it up. He is his own worst enemy.

 

"Man's got to know his limitations"

Clint Eastwood

 

They can alter the car etc but Im happy they said he needed to adapt as well. He can talk more if he does adapt to then beating Oscar consistently. We shall see.

 

I don't accept that of him, sorry. For years he's been taunting others saying how easy life is in top cars and he'll show them how it's done when he gets a quick car. Well, last year after Miami he had the fastest car mnus like 2-3 races. He bottled far too many. "inexperienced fighting at the front" was the excuse then. Now he has to adapt to the car? Sorry Lando...all talk no action. He doesn't have the mentality that the likes of Max, Alonso, Hamilton, Vettel, Kimi showed when they have the fastest car. **** he's spending more time currently trying to make the world believe his car isn't even all that good lol.

 

There was a sense that he was improving until the wall showed up. Early races but he now faces his new partner who has this nice statistic lol
Go Oscar Lando has speed but can he just put together a calm focused weekend soon............

--Oscar Piastri at McLaren is learning fast, and despite being 163 race starts behind Verstappen and 82 F1 races behind Norris experience-wise, he's now won 10 per cent of his 51 race starts and leads the world championship.--

 

Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

I think there was one thing that showed the difference in quality between Lando and Oscar and that was the respective overtakes on LuLu. Piastri sent it and dispatched Hamilton like a fly off his shoulder while Lando dithered, passed and repassed, not learning from the previous lap. That is where races and championships are won and lost.

 

That overtake was very reminicent of his overtake of Hamilton in Australia in the wet

 

Ciao Lando??

Zak Brown leaving the door open for Carlos Sainz to return to McLaren
McLaren would welcome Carlos Sainz back to the team in the future, according to Zak Brown.

 

What?!?...

 

LOL Maybe this will light a fire under Norris's ass? I would easily take Sainz over Norris.