McLaren MP4/1
McLaren team's Formula One car
The McLaren MP4/1 (initially known as the MP4) was a Formula One racing car produced by the McLaren team. It debuted at round three of the 1981 season, the Argentine Grand Prix, and saw continued use in 1982 and 1983. It was one of the first Formula One cars to use a monocoque chassis wholly manufactured from carbon fibre composite, a concept which is now ubiquitous. Whilst the Lotus 88 was the first Formula One car to debut with a composite chassis at the US Grand Prix West at Long Beach that was the opener for the 1981 season, it was banned during that race weekend, so the MP4/1 was the first to actually race with a composite chassis.
The chassis was designed by John Barnard, Steve Nichols and Alan Jenkins. The car was initially powered by a Ford-Cosworth DFV engine, which was the standard in Formula One at the time.
Background and name
Formula One teams had been using carbon-fibre reinforced polymer to build auto parts since 1975, when a carbon fibre rear wing was added to Graham Hill's Embassy. As teams optimised the ground effect cars in vogue at the time, teams began to realise that aluminium, the industry-standard building material at the time, was not stiff enough to handle the degree of downforce exerted on the very best cars. Carbon fibre was both lighter and stiffer than aluminium. After watching Rolls-Royce engineers use carbon fibre to build the Rolls-Royce RB211 turbofan engine, chassis designer John Barnard began drawing up plans for a complete carbon fibre car.
The public source identifies “McLaren MP4/1” as mcLaren team's Formula One car. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around McLaren, team's and Formula.
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This entry incorporates text from “McLaren MP4/1” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.