With developing its Formula 1 machine for the final year of the current rule cycle “not a walk in the park,” Andrea Stella revealed McLaren was prompted to innovate with its 2025 car.
The ground effect rule cycle will come to an end in 2025 ahead of next year’s rule changes and it was evident last year that development margins were tight.
2024 was one of the most competitive seasons on record and several teams suffered development pitfalls.
One team that didn’t was McLaren, a team that took a cautious development approach en route to becoming a class leader and Constructors’ champion.
It was a journey that started with a race-winning Miami Grand Prix upgrade that McLaren took its time to evolve, educating itself to develop at the opportune moment.
Stella explained that this education has informed development for McLaren’s 2025 challenger, the MCL39.
“Well, first of all, I think in some areas of the car, this period between Miami and the next round of upgrades gave us some learning, that we keep exploiting as a learning itself, which allowed us to finalise a geometry that we took to wherever it was, Mexico or Austin, but the learning itself was useful to keep the development going,” he said.
“So this allowed us to definitely have some new parts in the 2025 car, but at the same time developing cars with these very mature regulations proves to be not a walk in the park.”
MCL39: McLaren’s innovator
With the F1 field set to tighten even further in 2025 in tandem with a narrowing scope of exploiting the technical regulations, the MCL39 is an innovator.
The car features fundamental changes to its layout and packaging, perhaps a crazy thought considering its predecessor was the class of the field, but Stella explained that McLaren is searching for “margins for development”.
Those margins will be pushed between the team’s launch on Thursday and pre-season testing in Bahrain, with changes to come on the MCL39.
“Some of the upgrades will come in the early races of the season because some of them not necessarily made it or didn’t make it fully matured enough to actually be on the launch car, and they may be upgraded later on,” Stella said.
“So it still remains quite a bit of a challenge to develop cars because the technical regulations are now very mature, and that’s also why we needed to look at the fundamental layout of the car to find some margins for development rather than simply work with the volumes that were available before in the 2024 car.”
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