McLaren has warned that removing the negative handling traits which became embedded within its Formula 1 car late last season could take the team “months to address”.
After opening the previous term struggling towards the rear of the grid, the addition of mid-season upgrades converted McLaren into Red Bull’s most consistent contender.
But while the Woking-based squad logged nine podiums and a Sprint win in Qatar, Lando Norris was made to rue several qualifying errors through the closing rounds.
The Briton slipped up in Qatar, Mexico and Brazil before a slide in Abu Dhabi — which cost him a front-row start – culminated in him labelling his efforts over a single lap as “shit”. Meanwhile, Oscar Piastri admitted that he had also encountered issues at the finale.
That prompted McLaren Team Principal Stella to ponder whether the squad’s series of developments could have instigated bad behavioural characteristics in its MCL60.
The Italian engineer has now revealed McLaren has since investigated the matter and come to the conclusion that its revamped car did contribute to the problem.
When asked by Autosport to provide an update on the situation, Stella said: “Yes, we definitely questioned ourselves – whether we had made the car quicker, but somehow slightly more difficult to be exploited when you go to the limit in qualifying.
“We have looked at, first of all, confirming whether this question was fair or if it was just kind of random episodes but not actually correlated from a technical point of view.
“We think that definitely there’s some areas that we could have looked into, and they affect the aerodynamics side.”
Stella divulged that McLaren has been able to eradicate some of those habits on its 2024 challenger, the MCL38, but conceded the remaining flaws will take time to resolve.
“Some of the benefits may be embedded onto the launch car, but actually some of the projects belong to a workstream that may land trackside with some other developments,” he added.
“Some things require a few months to be addressed, let’s say.”
Although he alluded to the inconsistencies being an aero complication, Stella believes the necessity to run the current ground effect cars close to the surface to extract performance should also be considered.
“On these cars, aerodynamics and ride, they go pretty much hand-in-hand – because you know that you would like to run these cars as low as possible to the ground,” he explained. “This is one of the challenges for every team.
“Looking at where the right compromise is from this point of view for instance, just to give you a concrete, real example of where we’ve been looking at, this is an area that deserves some attention.
“There’s some other areas which I wouldn’t disclose just for a matter of protecting our IP, let’s say, but this was one of the priorities of the winter.”
Discussion about this post