Imagine a Formula One team fighting for a world championship with a year-old car all season

because they failed to ever get their new car up to the standard required to race it.

It seems unthinkable in modern F1, yet in 2003, this is exactly what happened.

This is the story of McLaren's radical MP418, the car that was too flawed to race.

Welcome to the latest episode of Bring Back V10s, brought to you by The Race.

This is our new retro podcast, if you're joining us for the first time, focusing on the gloriously noisy V10 era of F1 that we consider 1989 to 2005.

We'll be bouncing all across that era during our first series, revisiting famous stories and races in a level of depth never seen before.

And thank you to our guests who were already with us

for our first two episodes where we focused on Alan Pross getting fired by Ferrari in 1991.

Today, though, we're focusing on 2003. And remember, our season finale is going to be an episode

dictated completely by you, our audience. We want you to send questions

and comments to at We Are the Race on social media or email ask at the dashrace.com. An entire

final episode will be led by the topics you want us to discuss. I'm Glenn Freeman and joining me for a

look at this car that Adrian Newe would probably rather forget is F1 journalist Ed Straw, but first a man who had the, shall we say, misfortune of having to work on the MP418 briefly, former McLaren mechanic, Mark Priestley. Mark, welcome. Morning, thank you very much for having me. Yeah, definitely would rather forget it, but here we are talking about it in depth. Yeah, yeah, somehow we've got you in, yeah, sorry about that. We'll come out with something better to talk to you about in the future. But you're a very busy man these days. You're not following the F1 paddock around assembling and disassembling cars for Kimmy Reichen and the like anymore. But tell us what you're up up to because you're an incredibly busy man yeah pretty

busy and so I left the team left McLaren in 2009 and since then kind of by accident I've stumbled

into a sort of media career I guess but it's taken on various forms and I've spent a few years

travelling with the circus working for broadcasters like Sky, doing bits of commentary.

But I'm now kind of travelling less, but working perhaps more.

So I'm doing my own YouTube channel around the subject, everything to do with Formula One

and perhaps my technical and operational insight that I have.

I wrote a book a year ago on which covers some of this about the MP418 as well and some of

my stories and the drivers and teams that I've worked with. So I'm doing a huge amount of things.

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