"ONE PERSON WHO DEFINITELY DIDN'T DESIGN THE MP4/4 WAS ME. BUT I WAS CHIEF FROM THE MP4/5"

For half a century, Neil Oatley has lived and breathed Formula 1 and is still involved on a day-to-day basis with McLaren. Retirement? No time soon...

- Neil Oatley

Here is a bold claim with which to kick off an interview/ profile: no one has ever devoted to motor sport so great a proportion of such a long working life as has Neil Oatley. He is a McLaren stalwart, having worked for the company for the past 39 years. He spent most of those as-near-asdammit four decades as a key cog in its legendarily successful Formula 1 wheel, but now he focuses on the company’s F1 Heritage operation and its LMDh (Le Mans Daytona hybrid) World Endurance Championship Hypercar project. So he works a bit less hard these days than he used to, right?

“Er, no, wrong,” he sheepishly admits. “Much to my wife’s disgust, I work as many hours as ever.” I am astonished. After all, he is 71. Moreover, when I was McLaren’s comms/PR chief, from 2008 to 2017, Oatley was famous among all our colleagues for his relentless industry, working long stints into the evenings and even nights, regarding the Saturdays and Sundays of non-grand prix weekends as ideal opportunities to get stuck into thorny projects that were less easy to bend his remarkably fecund mind to during the cut and thrust of the working week.