The leader of the effort was Caroline Hargrove, a mechanical engineer with more than a decade of experience in racing. Hargrove was a lecturer at Cambridge University, just beginning to question her suitability to a life in academia, when she spotted an ad for a job at McLaren Racing in an engineering journal. The Montreal native had little interest in cars, but she liked interesting problems, and she applied.
She started at McLaren in 1997 as part of a small team developing a racing simulator. Then as now, women were a rarity among Formula One engineers. Simulators were rarer still: None of the teams had one. Even at McLaren there was little enthusiasm for the project. The drivers complained about the poor graphics, and the team’s head designer at the time, Adrian Newey, let it be known that he found the technology useless. Gradually, Hargrove and the other engineers improved the software and the mechanics. Then Formula One imposed limits on the amount of time cars could be tested on the track, and suddenly every team needed a simulator.
Today, McLaren has two of the machines: full-size car bodies mounted on hydraulics surrounded by curving video screens, with robotic arms that jerk the driver’s helmet back and forth to imitate the violent G-forces of high-speed turns. One sits in the basement of the Woking headquarters, near the wind tunnel; the other is in the laboratory-like area above, where McLaren’s race cars are built and the ultrahigh-end consumer cars it recently began selling are designed. An encyclopedic range of courses and conditions can be programmed into the simulators, but they’re more than just training tools. They’re able to calculate how different components affect a car’s handling, even if those components exist only as a set of specs. That means the team can test parts on the simulator before it actually builds them, so only the promising ones would be fabricated and tried out at the track. Before McLaren started using a simulator, just 10 percent of the parts it made ended up being used in its race cars; now, 90 percent of them do.