The greatest cars of F1's modern era: The MP4/13 that took McLaren and Mika Hakkinen to glory

Every day this week, Luke Slater is picking one of the most memorable Formula One cars of the past 30 years. He will look at what made each car special, looking at how it performed and will be speaking to some of those involved in the making of their successes and technical innovations.

The 'greatest' here is not defined purely by on-track success. It is a combination of success, style and significance. Today is the turn of McLaren's MP4/13 from 1998. Read about Nigel Mansell's FW14B from 1992 and the beautiful Jordan 191 here. 

Why the MP4/13?

McLaren’s 1998 car is a ripe pick for several reasons.  Firstly, it was the car that ended the team's seven-year wait for a title. That may not seem like a particularly lengthy period, especially given their current race-winning drought. But when you had won six manufacturers’ and seven drivers’ titles in eight years, it must have felt like a very long time.  

After four years of relative mediocrity, the addition of perhaps the finest technical mind of the modern era in Adrian Newey from Williams was a boon. The narrower cars and grooved tyres may not have been to everyone's tastes (they were definitely more unsightly than the 1997 cars) but in the hands of eventual champion Mika Hakkinen and third-placed David Coulthard it delivered a driver and constructor, McLaren's most recent, double championship. 

And, given Mercedes’ – then McLaren’s works engine partner – remarkable recent success as a works team, it started  a period of sustained success that has yet to end.

What made it so special?

How a car looks plays a huge part in making it memorable and the striking black and silver design helped the MP4/13, though it was some way from the red and white liveried cars of the 1980s and 1990s that gave the cars their MP (for Marlboro Project) titles.

It helped, too of course, that McLaren were then a works Mercedes team and the West Tobacco livery brought the Silver Arrows term back into (somewhat incorrect) usage.

The relatively short-lived but hugely innovative “brake steer” system – operated through an extra pedal – was the source of major intrigue in the paddock before it was banned two races into the season (more on that below).

It was a monster of a car in qualifying, too, taking 12 of the first 13 pole positions of the season.

The inside view: David Coulthard, McLaren driver 1996-2004

Coulthard had spent two years at McLaren and won two races with the MP4/12 in 1997, but the team only finished fourth in the standings. The MP4/13 was an entirely different beast.

The regulations had changed significantly for 1998, with cars narrowed by 200mm and grooved tyres introduced, aimed at reducing the cornering speeds.

“Adrian [Newey] and the other designers were getting into more sophisticated ways of generating downforce from below the car,” Coulthard tells Telegraph Sport. “What’s been interesting for me is that I look where I started, driving active cars all the way through to those now to narrow-track grooved tyres to where I finished up at the end of my career.

“They all have different personalities and different feedback, but ultimately balance is balance. If you can achieve a balance, irrespective of the lap time you feel at one with the car.”

The balance of the MP4/13 was clearly there - but so were the lap times. Having Newey to hand turned out, unsurprisingly, to be an advantage, especially given the regulation changes. The result was a typically tightly packaged car.

“Adrian’s just got that all-round ability,” Coulthard says.  “He has design capability, he's got race engineering capabilities, and he's done some hobby racing as well, so he understands what the driver means.”

The strength of the MP4/13 became apparent in pre-season testing. Coulthard did the initial shakedown, with Hakkinen taking over the next day. The Finn was immediately on the pace of the previous day’s quickest time, and soon went quicker.

“At that point, the team were like ‘bring the car in’. They realised that the car was an exceptional car, and it was a case of not showing your hand.”

The MP4/13 took its pace advantage to the first race of the season in Melbourne. Hakkinen was on pole, with Coulthard narrowly behind. The rest of the field were nowhere. Its fragility, though, was a concern.

“We arrived at the first Grand Prix with a car that was quick but had never actually managed to do an entire Grand Prix distance uninterrupted,” Coulthard says.

Still, the team took a dominant 1-2, both cars lapping the field. However, the supreme dominance of the MP4/13 on its debut was overshadowed by Coulthard letting through Hakkinen to take the win a few laps from the end, after a pre-race agreement between the drivers that came from those reliability concerns.

“I think Ron [Dennis, team principal] had suggested that whoever got pole would then be not challenged during the race. I declined that opportunity,” Coulthard says. Hakkinen was known to be the more natural qualifier, so Coulthard proposed that whoever led into the first corner would go unchallenged, which was agreed.

Hakkinen took pole, kept the lead at the start and was on course to win before he mistakenly came into the pitlane, surrendering his lead to Coulthard, who stuck steadfastly to the initial agreement.  It took some of the gloss off their performance. Was this crushing dominance a surprise? Coulthard says no.

“It probably was – I think if I was there today in my role in television, I would remember seeing somebody being that much farther ahead. But to be inside the mind of the driver, you're just so focused on the next opportunity. Whatever lap time you do, especially if it’s a good one, you’re like ‘well, of course I’ve done a good lap time, of course I’m the quickest’.”

The second brake pedal…

The MP4/13 had been designed around the new regulations much better than its competitors. But it was the presence of a mysterious piece of technology or mechanical system that drew intrigue from the rest of the grid.   

The system was known as “brake steer” or the “fiddle brake” and was first deployed on the 1997 car.  At the Austrian Grand Prix that year photographer Darren Heath captured the rear – but not the front – brake disc of Hakkinen’s car glowing through a corner. A curious development that warranted further investigation.

Later that season, Heath managed to stick his camera inside Hakkinen’s McLaren footwell and found an extra pedal – three as opposed to his usual two.

Brake steer allowed the rear brakes to function on one side of the car only, giving a performance advantage in corners through increased stability and reduced understeer. It was the brainchild of Steve Nichols, who designed the all-conquering 1988 MP4/4, and sounds devilishly complex but was anything but.

“It was a very simple system. It played on an old technology. All it did was apply brake pressure on an individual axle,” Coulthard recalls.

In the early version the extra pedal could be set up to be used only on the left or the right rear brake. But the addition of switches on the steering wheel for 1998 gave drivers the option to use it on either side throughout a lap.  An extra master cylinder was also necessary. The inside rear wheel would under-rotate, moving the car much like a tank track, Coulthard explains. 

“The biggest challenge that we both had to overcome was the realisation that as you push the additional pedal through a high-speed corner you had to increase the throttle, because as you push the brake and it reduced the inside wheel rotation speed, it would tend to want to lock the wheel and it would be like pulling on half a handbrake,” Coulthard says.

“We actually started to use it to reduce inside wheelspin coming off the hairpin corners as well, which proved quite effective.”

How much lap-time did it give? A few tenths is Coulthard’s estimate.

“It gave performance, therefore it's on the car. Anywhere with fast, long corners it was going to have more of an effect.

“I've always had this belief that racing drivers, if you told them they had to sing the national anthem of Russia backwards while juggling chainsaws, if it would give them two-tenths of a second in performance guaranteed, then we'd all learn how to do it!”

It was banned not too long into the season but clearly was not the sole source of McLaren's prowess. They won another seven races without it. 

How did it perform?

It won the constructors’ championship and nine of the 16 races in 1998. In qualifying trim, it was comfortably the fastest car, with 12 pole positions, including nine in a row at the start of the season. That early season form gave them a 36-point gap to Ferrari after the Monaco Grand Prix with Michael Schumacher 22 points (in effect more than two wins) behind Hakkinen, who finally fufilled his dream in a superb season.

The season-ending total of 156 points – and 23-point gap to Ferrari – is decent enough if not outstanding. It did, though, take five 1-2 finishes. This does not show how good a car it really was, especially on the high-speed circuits thanks to the grunt of the Ilmor-Mercedes V10.

Ferrari, through Schumacher's excellence, managed to claw their way back into both title fights in the middle of the season but the MP4/13’s superiority and early-season advantage was too much to overcome.  Although the car was the high benchmark for McLaren for a prolonged period, in performance terms, it does not rank up there with the most dominant cars of the modern era.

Defining performances?

It is hard to look beyond the shock-and-awe of its first competitive outing in the 1998 Australian Grand Prix. In qualifying both Hakkinen and Coulthard were more than 0.75 seconds ahead of the next best car, Schumacher’s Ferrari.

On Sunday they were in a race of their own, Hakkinen setting the tone for his maiden championship year. The third man on the podium, Heinz-Harald Frentzen’s Williams, didn’t even finish on the same lap.  

The next race in Brazil was barely any better for their rivals. It was another comfortable front-row lockout for McLaren and in the Grand Prix Coulthard and Hakkinen finished over a minute ahead of Schumacher’s Ferrari.