Stella sure McLaren can maintain progress curve

There are no signs that McLaren’s development curve is beginning to tail off, after its strong in-season progress in 2023, according to Team Principal Andrea Stella.

McLaren started last year in the doldrums, having already written off its design concept, but strode into podium contention mid-season after introducing a heavily renovated MCL60.

McLaren continued to make gains with further update packages across the second half of 2023 and improved to finish in fourth position in the championship.

Speaking at the unveiling of its 2024 livery, which will adorn the yet-to-be-unveiled MCL38, Stella expressed confidence that McLaren still has sizeable gains to make.

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“So far I have to say we don’t see the diminishing returns, this obviously will have to be proven once we put the car on the ground,” he said.

“But when it comes to the wind tunnel development or CFD development we see that the gradient we established last year that led to the Austria development and then the Singapore development it seems we can maintain it.

“We are already starting to work on the further developments that we hope to bring relatively soon in-season and they also seem to be quite interesting.

“I would say in terms of the regulations themselves and the development we are having specifically at McLaren it seems like the kind of linear gradient of development can be maintained.

“It could be there’s some areas of the car you realise maybe the investment here is not worthwhile, but so far, we have not found it. 

“You look at the car, suspension, tyres, aerodynamics, they all still have quite a lot to offer in these generation of regulations so what we are looking at very carefully is to make sure we’re in condition to cash in these performance opportunities that do seem to be available. 

“This is reflected in numbers, so we can’t fool ourselves, we need to see these numbers go up, right now it’s what we seem to be finding in development, but it’s a slightly different story when it comes to competitiveness on track as this depends on what the opposition has done.”

McLaren is entering the new season with its revised technical structure in operation.

Former Ferrari chief David Sanchez and ex-Red Bull figure Rob Marshall have joined Peter Prodromou in a three-pronged structure that reports to Stella.

Stella has been buoyed by their initial contributions in the opening couple of weeks at the team.

“Definitely what we can see in the first two weeks is that they come with quite a lot of knowledge, no surprise, they’ve been part of great teams, great projects,” Stella explained.

“The good thing is we see this integrates with our knowhow, so it’s not like ‘ah we should do things in this way,’ which is opposite to what we do, it’s ‘we can do things in this way’, which adds to what you do, which is refreshing.

“Practically, we need to think right now – not only at McLaren – we have a 2024 car, then we are already setting the basis for how do we evolve the ‘24 [car] onto the ’25 [car], then there’s a ‘26 project with completely new technical regulations so there’s so much work that we need to go through.

“It is very important to have these high calibres leading their respective technical areas because this means we have the capacity, the capability, the competence to approach these three big projects with the horsepower to compete in the top of Formula 1.”