Site: Mclaren F1

by Chris on 18 March 2010

http://mclaren.com/formula1

A look at Mclaren's shiny new website, and by God it's shiny!

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Pros

Pole postition

This is by far the champion of F1 sites, and since the 2010 season started last weekend we thought we would see what how Mclaren handles on the web. 

A lovely landing page with big, big imagery, which seems to be a bit of a trend at the moment and we can’t fault them as it has been incorporated well into the design of the site. The main image is of the upcoming GP location which is currently Australia and it looks stunning. We can’t wait to see how Silverstone will match up to the more exotic places in the world when the British GP takes place in July (not quite so sexy we imagine.)

Navigation is a breeze, although we are not quite sure about the hiding nav function but more on that later. All the info a F1 nerd could want is here, and the standout feature for us is the tab dedicated to each race which kicked off in Bahrain for those with there eyes & ears shut all weekend.

Again clean and clear imagery used to show off the exotic location, but the real gem is the commentary log which quite simply is a minute by minute account of the race banter between driver and technical team which we can see being a big feature for the hardcore fan.

It’s not really a criticism of the site but we did find the online shop hilarious!

As Matt put it quite well ‘the clothes look like the kind you get in M&S or Debenhams’ they reek of middle class, and are frankly swag…

Some of our favourite finds are the luxurious multimedia sock and the one size fit’s all crash helmet keyring and don’t forget the inspiring footwear range…just start here and have a browse yourself (not much good if you don’t like black!)

Good stuff Mclaren! just give the shoes a rest for now yeah?

Cons

Burn out

Now we are nitpicking a bit but there were a couple of issues that stood out for us, one being something mentioned earlier that the nav has an odd hiding mechanism which is a tad confusing and a bit unnecessary.

Of course we might be proved wrong because as the season goes on and more races are completed (we are assuming that) each location will get it’s own space in the nav thus by the close of the season the nav will be pretty deep. This could be some genius pre-emptive design or just a someone who wanted to get home early to play Battlefield Bad Company 2 we will have to wait and see!

We were not too keen on the interaction that anything you click pops up in a new separate window, again did someone want to knock off early to go get a pint or what? It just feels like a lot of time was spent getting the index pages all nice and then they just bunged in the rest of the content. Come on Mclaren….

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