Arrow McLaren chief reveals team's SECRET WEAPON

A senior figure from within Arrow McLaren's IndyCar setup has opened up on the team's secret weapon behind the scenes that has been described as a 'statement piece'.

The team remains in contention for the 2024 IndyCar championship with star driver Pato O'Ward still having an outside shot at the title as the season draws to a close.

Ahead of Saturday's race at the World Wide Technology Raceway, O'Ward sits fifth in the standings with a decent deficit to make up on current championship leader Alex Palou.

Whilst it will be tough, McLaren will be aiming to close that gap, and to do so, they will no doubt be looking to use the impressive infrastructure they have put in place behind the scenes to help them.

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Arrow McLaren reveal 'secret weapon'

In a recent interview, Arrow McLaren lead design engineer Robert Gue discussed the team's operations center, something that has been dubbed 'NTT Data Strategy Control'.

'NTT DATA Strategy Control' took McLaren 18 months to build and is taken to each event on the calendar. Whilst from the outside it simply bears the footprint of a trailer, inside things are very different, with it having been designed by the team from scratch to be filled with technology.

“We’ve got 24 seats. There’s a lot of people in here,” explained Gue on the downstairs level of the trailer, via Motorsport Week.

“In the middle, we have the race engineer for the drivers, the performance engineers. This is where all the debriefs happen before and after [each session]. The support engineers are along the side. Each person has their own station with an upper and lower monitor they can work on.

“We have headsets and we do all our briefings on Teams, that way people working remotely can tune in. People in the other trucks or people upstairs can tune in as well. It helps from a communication standpoint to be able to do everything online. Then you can share wherever so people in the UK or people in Indianapolis can tune in as well and follow along."

Gue then compared McLaren's setup to that of their rivals, explaining that no other team have anything comparable at this stage.

"Other teams have dedicated engineering trucks, but none have the amount of seating or layout that this one has,” he explained.

“We had an old one that didn’t have any slide-outs, so it was just the central desk.

"We rapidly outgrew that as the team expanded."

Gue best sums up McLaren's project at the end of the interview, declaring it "a statement piece that raises the game of the paddock.”

It will certainly be interesting to see if any other teams follow suit with a similarly designed project in the future.

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