The construction of the car, the basic materials, the kind of homologation tests, the inter-connective tissue between the four tires and the size of the contact patch of the tires, hasn’t changed enormously. Engine horsepower has changed, aerodynamic performance has changed. But if you look at the performance of the car now and ask, “What does it take to win?” — you need the best power-train, you need great aerodynamics on the car, you need a fantastic way of exploiting the tires, and you need a great driver. That’s still the same recipe. The amount that each contributes may have varied over that period of time, and the performance differential on the grid is narrowed.

Q. How can that be the case when you have teams with a minuscule budget and top teams with a huge one?

A. It is in the interest of the regulating body and the commercial rights holder to make sure that racing is close. So if McLaren were to go to Malaysia and find “Magic Widget X” and sign an exclusive deal on the production of “Magic Widget X” for our car only, and it gave it half-a-second lap time improvement and nobody else could get access to it, I could pretty much guarantee that even if we managed to get the thing to the race it would be banned after the first or second race. Because it is not in the interest of the sport as a marketing rights property for anybody to run completely away with the series with some kind of dominant technology. The sport needs to be managed in a way that provides the drama, the pathos, the personal duel between the drivers, all of that jeopardy that is important in the sport — it still needs to be a meritocracy. It can’t become a lottery. It has to be a meritocracy, so that you earn your way to a win.

Q. In the book celebrating 50 years of McLaren, the cars of 1988 and 1989, which were on the cutting edge at the time, look primitive today, don’t they?

A. They do — two-dimensional shapes. As I walk down the boulevard of McLaren Group headquarters in Woking, we have got many of the heritage cars, from Bruce McLaren’s original car there through the Indy 500 cars through the Formula One, and they span that 50 years. You’ve only got to walk three or four cars back, like to the championship with Lewis Hamilton in 2008, and you look at the level of complexity of that car and the number of aerodynamic devices, and the thing looks like something from “Star Wars.” And the F.I.A. decided at that point that they wanted to simplify or reduce the dependency of aerodynamics and the regulations changed. Now, here in 2013 without all those devices, we are back to the same levels of downforce that we would have enjoyed in those days of multiple devices. So we have that kind of “nature will find a way,” or in this case, it’s “the engineers will find a way.”