What problems Timo Glock is having with his McLaren, why the trigger could lie in last year’s race, and how a solution is now being sought under pressure in Woking
After Timo Glock’s bitter DTM comeback in Oschersleben at the back of the field, the Dörr team is doing everything it can to find the fault with the McLaren 720S GT3 Evo. “The car is doing something, but not what a race car should do,”
“Sometimes you have understeer, sometimes oversteer, you steer into the corner, but I can’t drive the radius that the others are driving. Some of them can drive tight in turn two, the long right-hander, but I can’t get there.” It’s even worse in left-hand corners.
“In turn three, the car is a disaster!” said Glock. ‘If you brake going into the corner, you have extreme oversteer. If you release the brakes too early, it just drives straight ahead. It’s like dancing on a razor’s edge.’ A comparison with the onboard footage of his teammate Ben Dörr shows a ‘difference like night and day.’
Schmid’s Zandvoort crash in 2024 as the cause of the problem?
The team has now replaced everything on the McLaren that Glock took over from his predecessor Clemens Schmid in the winter – except for the carbon monocoque and the rear frame, which is made of aluminum and therefore quite delicate. It is suspected because there have never been any problems with the McLaren monocoque before, but replacing a rear frame on another team is said to have solved a handling and performance problem.
In addition, while the front frame of Schmid’s car, which is also made of aluminum, was replaced after last year’s crash at Zandvoort, this was not the case with the rear frame. Theoretically, the part could have been damaged, even though Schmid competed in the remaining five race weekends with the car.
How Glock’s car is now being examined at McLaren
To leave nothing to chance, the Dörr team packed Glock’s car into a trailer to deliver it to McLaren in Woking on Tuesday.
“McLaren has CAD drawings, they know exactly what stiffness it should have, and they can check the frame on the test bench,” explains technical director Robin Dörr. ”The frame will be X-rayed there to check for hairline cracks or whether a weld has become tired. We don’t have these capabilities.”
Apart from that, McLaren can react immediately if it turns out that it is not the rear frame after all. Before that, the car has to be completely dismantled, which takes some time.
“The plan is to pick up the car again on Friday,” Robin Dörr clarifies. The team is under time pressure because the ADAC-organized test day for the second DTM weekend, which will take place from May 23 to 25, is already scheduled for next Tuesday at the Lausitzring.
Lausitz test puts time pressure on team: Dörr with three cars on site
Incidentally, the team will have three cars on site for the test: In addition to Ben Dörr’s new car, which was significantly faster at the season opener in Oschersleben and really revealed that there might be a problem with Glock’s car, Glock’s McLaren and Dörr’s car from last year will also be on site for the test.
This is because the McLaren team will probably be competing in the third round of the Nürburgring Endurance Series (NLS) with the car that, according to the team, has twice as many kilometers on the clock as Glock’s car, which would be the next race after the test.
“The goal is clear: we unload the car from the trailer, Timo gets in and says, ‘This is the car I want and the car I need,’” says Robin Dörr, hoping for a quick solution to the problem. ‘And we’ll go through our normal test program. Because if we start swapping cars, we’ll lose so much time.’
