McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella has pinpointed improved rear grip as one area where it has made a sizeable gain with its 2024 Formula 1 car from its predecessor.
McLaren is bidding to build on its remarkable progress from last season that took the team from struggling to score points to becoming a regular contender for podiums.
But while the Woking-based squad’s MCL60 challenger proved to be a challenger to Red Bull on high-speed circuits, low-speed sections remained a perennial weakness.
Stella notes that testing highlighted that the team has made progress when it comes to adding more grip at the rear of its car but admitted there are still gains to be made.
“I think some of the weaknesses have been improved,” he said. “For instance, we are I would say happier with the grip at the rear axle, which was one of the aspects that we wanted to work on. Overall there is more grip in the car.
“There are some aspects that we still have some work to improve, save the fact that the major performance opportunity remains overall grip.
“It’s not like you need to correct features, you just have to put more grip on the car, which mainly comes from aerodynamic performance.
“But we have some more margin to improve, also from a mechanical point of view. And also in terms of interaction with the tyres. So in all these three aspects we plan to bring developments over the course of the season.”
Having crafted some creative interpretations, Stella was pleased that McLaren’s MCL38 correlated with what the team had envisioned based on its simulation runs.
“I would say that starting from a performance point of view, the car delivers what we expected,” he said. “So no big surprises, which in itself is some good news, because there’s some elements of innovation in the car.
“I think the car is a good foundation for development, and is a step forward compared to last year’s car.
“But, overall, I can see that many cars have made the step forward, which is normal. Everyone finds performance in every week of development.
“There’s one car that seemed to have found a big step. Unfortunately, the car that was already the quickest last year.
“I would say the [chasing] group was already quite compact last year, and to me it looks like even more compact this year.”
The Italian had cautioned at the launch of the 2024 car that McLaren had not been able to address some aspects in time for the launch-spec version of its latest machine.
And while Stella reiterates there is promise once those are rectified, he concedes that Red Bull’s seismic step could threaten to overshadow the extent of McLaren’s gains.
“There are some areas of the car in this launch specification that have significantly evolved compared to last year,” he said. “Some of them are very noticeable. There are some other areas that have only incrementally improved.
“But we see in the background in development that there’s actually quite a lot of potential, which we didn’t exploit in time to make it for the launch car.
“We are confident in our development. We are confident in the concepts that we have in the car, but if anything, it’s a matter of how far you are in the journey.
“And clearly they [Red Bull] have been ahead in this journey. And they sort of keep this margin in terms of where they are positioned in their development journey.”
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