McLaren needs ’12 months’ to turn F1 weaknesses into strengths

McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella suspects it needs 12 more months of development in Formula 1 before turning the current weaknesses of its car into strengths.

McLaren completed one of the most remarkable turnarounds in F1 last term as it went from struggling to accumulate points to being a consistent podium challenger.

The Woking-based squad has maintained that momentum in the nascent stages of 2024, with Lando Norris achieving the team’s first podium in Australia since 2014.

But Norris has admitted the MCL38 continues to retain a “significant” deficit to its rivals in the slow-speed corners, while top speed with DRS active is also a weak area.

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Stella is adamant that McLaren’s current shortcomings have not surprised the engineers, citing how those flaws are a “consequence” of the development route it chose.

Asked whether McLaren would be able to battle Red Bull with those flaws eradicated, Stella said: “Yeah. “But you know, erasing the weaknesses is car development.

“It’s not like you have these weaknesses because something goes wrong. There’s nothing going wrong, it’s just the car is not developed enough and these aspects expose themselves into you become weak in long corners or you don’t have enough speed in DRS.

“But this is effectively a consequence of the development. There’s nothing going wrong.

“Like if you ask me how is the car behaving, I say it’s behaving very well, like it goes as expected. It does exactly what we expect from the wind tunnel, it does what we expect from the computer development. It’s just that you need to raise the operating point from a performance point of view, aerodynamic efficiency, mechanical grip and so on.

“So we are extremely happy with the rate of development over the last 12 months but there’s, I would say, another 12 months [of] development that we need to go through to actually, I think, offer a car that is strong in DRS and is strong in the long corners.”

Stella reiterated his comments from Saudi Arabia earlier this month that McLaren will have a sizeable upgrade package coming once the European season commences.

“So I think I said it already, around race six, seven we should have a decent round of upgrades,” the Italian reaffirmed.

“Hopefully there will be potentially another couple of them throughout the season and this is why it will take the whole season to actually add enough performance for being here and saying we don’t see these weaknesses anymore because these areas have been improved.”