Allert also added he was sure that McLaren could make a strong impact. “The parallels with F1 are so obvious and so many” he said. “From the combination of athlete-machine to the use of aerodynamics, engineering, material science, the interplay of rubber compounds on road surfaces, fatigue management, recovery, fueling and hydration of the body under extreme conditions… these are all things we are very used to in F1.” “Now, that doesn’t mean that you can just immediately come into cycling and apply exactly the same philosophies. “But the basic knowledge we’ve built up, and the degree of science underpinning that knowledge, is probably at a more advanced level in F1 simply because the margins are so much smaller than they are in cycling. And that arms race is so much better funded in pursuit of those margins.” Brent Copeland, the South African general manager of Bahrain-Merida, described McLaren’s entry into the sport as, “the most exciting development in cycling in the last decade”, adding that comparisons with Team Sky were “inevitable”. “At the moment, the best team are Team Sky so it’s inevitable that people are going to say This is going to be a competition with Sky.” “Sky is British, McLaren is British. So, there will be a lot of talk of that. But that not our objective. Our objective is to keep it international, and to become the best.”
