For two-time Le Mans 24 Hours winner and long-time Formula 1 tester Alex Wurz, the question of choosing a favourite racing car isn’t dictated by whether he raced or tested it. Instead, it’s something rather more simple that is behind the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association president’s pick of the McLaren MP4-17D, a machine that narrowly missed out on the F1 world championship in 2003 with Kimi Raikkonen.
“I only think, ‘I am driving it to its limits in any condition’ – empty [tanks], light, alone, against competitors,” Wurz says. “And the 17D was just the most balanced and joyful and very fast car to drive.”
The original MP4-17 appeared in 2002, where it along with the rest of the field was blown away by Ferrari’s F2002. The first car to result from the matrix structure implemented by Martin Whitmarsh following Adrian Newey’s near-defection to Jaguar the previous year is described in Newey’s How to build a car autobiography as “a bit of a clumsy design, certainly not one of my best” with victory at Monaco with David Coulthard its sole noteworthy result. There was little to indicate that McLaren would mount a convincing title challenge with an evolved version of the same car in 2003.
Indeed, McLaren believed that a big step was needed to challenge Ferrari and so threw its weight behind Newey’s “ambitious” all-new MP4-18. But although its wind tunnel figures were promising, the infamous machine proved aerodynamically unstable in testing as well as being beset by excessive engine vibrations and cooling issues. Such were its problems that the car was never deemed sufficiently sorted to race, as McLaren instead persisted with the 17D throughout the 2003 campaign.
Wurz, who had joined McLaren as a tester for the 2001 season after losing his seat at Benetton, had a hefty shunt aboard the MP4-18 at Jerez and says it was “the exact opposite” of what made the 17D so special.
“It was the absolute least favourite,” he reflects of a car that formed the basis of the uncompetitive 2004 MP4-19A, “in fact the 18 with a different badge” according to Newey.
“I have respect of speed and I had shunts in my life, but I was never really scared. But the 18 I was scared, because things just kept breaking and you had big shunts.”
The MP4-17’s successor never lived up to expectations, forcing McLaren to revert to an updated version of the old car for 2003
Photo by: Lorenzo Bellanca / Motorsport Images
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