The big day that consecrated Ron Dennis and John Barnard’s McLaren came at the home race on the track in Silverstone on 18 July 1981. A track not really suitable for a car powered by a Cosworth engine, in the era in which turbos were now taking hold. Yet, at the end of qualifying dominated by the supercharged Renault of Arnoux and Prost, the two MP4 / 1s of John Watson and Andrea De Cesaris finished in fifth and sixth position. After a chaotic start to the race, with Villeneuve triggering a carom at the Woodcote corner on lap four, Watson had slipped to ninth and appeared to be lost in traffic, while De Cesaris had already been eliminated by the collision caused by the Canadian Ferrari. But, paradoxically, it was in those minutes that McLaren’s Northern Irish comeback began. Thanks to Pironi’s retirement for mechanical reasons with Ferrari, as well as those of Reutemann and Piquet, Watson found himself third behind the two Renault. The French single-seaters seemed to be able to control the race, but the joy of the Regié’s men was short-lived as Prost, who occupied the second place, was forced to retire due to the turbo failure on lap seventeenth. John thus became Arnoux’s first pursuer, who could count on a reassuring advantage, which was around 30 seconds. The race now seemed to be scored in favor of the Renault driver, but a French V6 exhaust that began to mutter favored Watson’s recovery.
To the round number sixty of the 1981 British Grand Prix, there was an epochal turning point: McLaren number seven was by now on Arnoux’s Renault, which had already been trying hard to resist him for one lap. At the Becketts bend, Watson completed his sparkling comeback by putting his rival in arrogance and passing like this leading the race. The audience was in a frenzy, as were the men in the McLaren box. At the end of the sixty-eight laps the checkered flag dropped on John Watson’s red and white car, which went on to win his second career Grand Prix after the one he won in Austria back in 1976 at the wheel of the Penske. A deserved success that consecrated and fully legitimized the gamble of Dennis, who had found in Barnard the right man to relaunch McLaren after years of black crisis. This success marked the beginning of a new season of success for the Woking team, but it was also the beginning of an epochal turning point regarding the construction technique of the F1 cars, the one that, borrowing the terminology used by scholars of history, we could define it as the age of carbon.
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