David Coulthard on McLaren's Secret Brake Pedal

Featured Image: Mclaren MP4/12

Have you heard of McLaren's 1997 brake-steer system? While largely undiscovered until mid 1997, the MP4/12 F1 car has a second brake pedal that aided the car mid corner. Buckle up, because this is a tale of ingenuity, secrecy, and controversy that shook up the paddock in the late 1990s.

Picture this: It's a sweltering summer day in 1997. Sharp-eyed photographer Darren Heath is reviewing his shots from the Austrian Grand Prix when something catches his eye.

The brake discs on Mika Häkkinen's McLaren are glowing orange mid-corner. Strange, right? F1 drivers don't usually brake while cornering - unless they're doing something extremely unusual.

Little did Heath know, he'd stumbled upon one of F1's most secretive innovations: McLaren's brake-steer system. But how did this all begin?

Let's rewind to Christmas 1996. McLaren's chief engineer, Steve Nichols, is taking a bath at his parents' house when – eureka! – an idea strikes.

"We typically set the cars up with quite a lot of understeer," Nichols recalls. "I had this idea to put a rear brake on in the corners, to sort of dial out the understeer."

This bathtub brainwave set the wheels in motion. Nichols pitched the concept to Paddy Lowe, then head of R&D at McLaren. After months of waiting, they finally got the green light to test it at Silverstone.

Now, you might be picturing some high-tech gadgetry, but the beauty of this system lay in its simplicity.

"All we had to do was put an extra master cylinder on the car, and a length of Aeroquip that went to the right rear calliper," Nichols explains. It was just "fifty quid's worth of parts" scavenged from the back of a race car transporter.

But boy, did those fifty quid make a difference! Mika Häkkinen, the first to test the system, immediately shaved half a second off his lap time. That's an eternity in F1 terms.

So how did it work? Essentially, the system allowed drivers to brake just one rear wheel mid-corner. This created a yaw moment, helping to turn the car and reduce understeer. Clever, right?

David Coulthard, Häkkinen's teammate, was initially skeptical. He even refused to test it at first, thinking it was "weird." But once he saw Häkkinen's times, he quickly changed his tune. 

"It was a brilliantly simple piece of engineering, which worked," Coulthard admits. "We had to learn how to work with it, because you had to accelerate while you braked, otherwise you just locked the wheel."

For a while, McLaren kept their secret weapon under wraps. But in F1, secrets have a way of getting out. Remember our friend Darren Heath? Well, he didn't stop at noticing those glowing brake discs. At the Luxembourg Grand Prix, he managed to snap a photo of the extra pedal in Häkkinen's cockpit. The cat was out of the bag.

Suddenly, the paddock was abuzz. Rival teams cried foul, claiming the system was essentially four-wheel steering. They argued it would cost millions to develop similar systems – ironically missing the point that McLaren had done it on the cheap.

The controversy came to a head in early 1998. Despite McLaren's protests that the system was legal – and remember, it had initially been cleared by the FIA – it was banned on the grounds of being "four-wheel steering."

Steve Nichols still sounds a bit miffed about it today. "I remember Alain Prost, who had a team at the time, saying we've got to ban this because it will cost millions in development," he says. "And it was fifty quid's worth of parts!"

Looking back, the brake-steer saga encapsulates what makes F1 so thrilling. It's not just about raw speed, but the constant push to innovate, to find that extra edge within the rules. Sometimes, as McLaren proved, the cleverest solutions are also the simplest.

The brake-steer system may have been short-lived, but it left a lasting mark on F1 history. It reminds us that in this high-tech sport, a moment of inspiration – even in the bathtub – can lead to game-changing innovation.