Alex Palou, McLaren, Circuit of the Americas, 2022

Pirro to run new McLaren driver programme featuring Palou, O’Ward and Ugochukwu

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In the round-up: McLaren has announced a refreshed driver development programme to support drivers from karting to their F1, IndyCar and Formula E programmes

In brief

McLaren launches refreshed driver development programme headed by Pirro

McLaren has refreshed its programme for supporting young and established development drivers and announced their programme will be headed by former F1 driver and Le Mans 24 Hours winner Emanuele Pirro.

The team has revised its existing programme to help support young drivers in karting and junior formulae and continue to support established drivers in its programme. At current, McLaren’s development roster consists of IndyCar drivers Alex Palou and Pato O’Ward and Formula 4 racer Ugo Ugochukwu.

“Together with my team, my role will assist in creating a state-of-the-art programme, selecting the best possible drivers and providing them with all the tools they need to make the best use of their talent,” said Pirro.

“Furthermore, embed them in the McLaren mission, vision and values and hopefully, have one of them progress to the F1 team.”

Newgarden quickest as Indy 500 open test begins

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Josef Newgarden set the pace in the first testing action ahead of next month’s Indianapolis 500 as a two-day open test began.

The Penske driver set the fastest lap speed of 227.686mph to go quickest of the 33 drivers who participated in the test. Rookie drivers Agustin Canapino, Benjamin Pedersen and Sting Ray Robb all successfully completed their rookie programmes.

Former Codemasters F1 lead becomes Motorsport Games CEO

Stephen Hood, the former creative director of Codemasters’ official F1 game franchise, has rejoined the troubled game developer Motorsport Games after the departure of its longtime CEO.

Motorsport Games own exclusive game developing rights to many major motorsport series, including IndyCar, the World Endurance Championship and NASCAR. Despite signing deals to produce a new IndyCar game and a new BTCC game among many other titles, the studio has only produced one major title, NASCAR 21 ignition, which received a poor reception from critics and players upon release. The company recently announced that its IndyCar game, originally scheduled for release this year, has been delayed to 2024.

Hood, who held senior roles on Codemasters’ F1 titles from 2009 to 2014, had previously worked at Motorsport Games as president until 2022. He replaces long time CEO Dmitry Kozko, who has stepped down from his role.

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Comment of the day

With Liberty Media aiming to bring the NFL’s ‘any given Sunday’ mantra to F1, @neilosjames eloquently points out the material difference between F1 and American football…

The ‘unpredictable’ nature of most sports is because they rely so heavily on the input of one or many standard humans, and with such high reliance on a human for all aspects of performance there will be always be substantial variability. Humans have off days, on days, moments of inspiration, make silly or forced errors, time things badly, miskick or mishit, etc etc. Even the most best human at their given sport (peak Messi, Djokovic, Williams, Woods, Tendulkar, James, Brady level) does almost every single thing on the pitch/court/course suboptimally.

F1 cars are so brilliantly, beautifully engineered that they just work. The power units never have moments of inspiration where they magic themselves an extra 50hp that they don’t always have. The aero parts don’t change their mind about how they’ll react to an airflow several times a lap. The tyres are predictable and don’t occasionally slip for no apparent reason, and the wheels don’t have a mind of their own and decide to point the wrong way every now and then. You get occasions when things don’t work perfectly (bit of oil on the racing line, PU failure, unexpected dirty air, poorly timed SC/red flag) but even if that happens to the leader, there’ll nearly always be another front runner having a normal race to take over.

There’s obvious a big human element too, but the human in F1 is shielded from his own variation by the perfect machine he’s sat in. F1 will never be an ‘Any Given Sunday’ sport because it’s so much more reliant on equipment than humans. Like comparing organic apples and 3D-printed oranges.
Neil

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday to Vincent, The Kef, Cyberaxiom and Dylan Mota!

Author information

Will Wood
Will has been a RaceFans contributor since 2012 during which time he has covered F1 test sessions, launch events and interviewed drivers. He mainly...

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One comment on “Pirro to run new McLaren driver programme featuring Palou, O’Ward and Ugochukwu”

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    Jere (@jerejj)
    21st April 2023, 8:03

    A deserved COTD choice.
    Most sports indeed rely heavily or solely on human input, unlike F1 or motorsports generally, but especially F1 as a non-spec series.

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