McLaren MP4/13

In the 1998 season the McLaren Mercedes team won the drivers and constructors F1 World Championship. Their car, the MP4/13 was an inflection point in terms of design. McLaren’s chief designer at that time, Adrian Newey, went further in performance levels, introducing new aerodynamic and mechanical ideas that allowed Hakkinen and Coulthard lapping all their rivals in the first race of the season.

This car, was of course very meaningful to me and I decided to build a scale model of this machine. During almost two years, I was building this car that has about 1000 different components. It is a static show car but inside its body cover there is a V10 engine that has its pistons, con-rods, valves, and everything else that composes a real engine. However, it does not run with petrol. The engine is operated by spinning the rear wheels so the motion of the internal components can be appreciated.

The dimensions were tooken from a Tamiya scale model at the size of 1/20. These dimensions at 1/20 were magnified at 1/5 in a CAD drawing. The software I used to model the master assembly was the TurboCAD 2D v 3.0. This software is quite simple but it did a fantastic job and helped me a lot to model the sheet metal templates. I also drew the engine parts, both for in-house parts and parts that were manufactured outside, like engine bloc and heads. Those are machined from a cast iron rough part. The next picture shows all the engine components were you can appreciate the number of little pieces that go inside this small assembly:

From all the components of the engine, the most difficult part to built is the crankshaft. It needs to be really strong to transfer the torque from one side of the engine to the other. At the same time it has a very complex geometry. To build this part, used five cranks that were MIG welded and joined them with a central hollow shaft that I welded trough tin welding. Tin welding avoids the central shaft to bend during the wleding process. A noticeable difference between the configuration of the real engine and this one, is that in this there are only two camshafts, instead of four. Also, note that the distribution system that transfers the motion from the crankshaft to the camshafts is made trough a chain, while in the real one a gear system is used.

It has also the suspension system and steering that works as the real car. The steering is operated by the steering wheel which is connected to a mini steering-rack. Suspension system is a pushrod type, like the real car. Furtermore, complex systems like torsion bars or antiroll bars are missing.  The body and most of the components are made out of steel sheet. The different pieces are welded with tin that gives enough strength to the assembly.

Since it is a static model, the car was fitted with the auxiliary components of the engine, such as radiators, hydraulic reservoir, cooling lines, electrical ECU’s and so on. This makes the car look even more realistic and looking at that car, one can get the idea about how the late 90’s cars looked like. To sump it up, the car, which is at 1/5 scale, weights 11 kg, with a length of about 90 cm.