McLaren Engineers ‘Scared’ by HALO Strength Tests

McLaren’s chief engineering officer Matt Morris admitted that the HALO tests gave his fellow McLaren engineers a few “heart-stopping moments”. The FIA had declared that the HALO will be incorporated into the 2018 F1 designs and beyond. Their ruling tested all the teams’ designers and their ability to marry the device and the car’s chassis. They all say that trimming the car’s weight and ensuring that the Halo could cope with the massive loads wasn’t always easy.

Mercedes tech boss James Allison recently described it as having to take the weight of a London double decker bus. However, Morris said that it caused a few moments of worry for McLaren. He said, “It has been a big challenge. The loads are very, very high. We always knew it was going to be a challenge and we invested some time and money up front to do quite a lot of test pieces. Obviously you don’t want to build a complete chassis, but we built various test pieces where we had dummy Halos, parts of Halos, full Halos, and testing how the interfaces would behave.”

Morris continued, “We found some issues but we planned early enough so we could react to those issues and catch the main chassis, which we did. It was close. I am not saying we breezed through it, and there were quite a few heart-stopping moments when doing the static test that comes in from an oblique angle – where it takes the weight of a London Bus. When you see that test going on, it is pretty scary with the amount of load going in there, which it is designed to do.”

With all these tests going on, the FIA and the sport are taking no chances in terms of safety. The drivers and fans may not like the decision but they will have to get used to the idea. The McLaren engineers not only have to worry about the HALO but also turning around their dismal 3 years with Honda.