McLaren's Key seeking more 'balanced' car for 2022

McLaren believes F1's new regulations has allowed it the opportunity to field a more balanced car in 2022, with its all-new contender enjoying better strength in slow-speed corners than its predecessors.

McLaren had a firm grip in the first half of last season on third place in the Constructors' standings but ultimately lost out to Ferrari in the closing races of its 2021 campaign.

The high-speed qualities of the Woking-based outfit's MCL35M procured an advantage at certain venues but also left it at a deficit at others.

McLaren technical director James Key has centered part of his efforts for 2022 on conceiving a new design that will offer better low-speed performance.

"We did pay a lot of attention to drag on the 2020 car, and as we did for the ’19 car, that was a bit before my time, but I know that was a priority for that car and it all carried through," Key said, quoted by Motorsport.com.

"Efficiency is good. I think what we’ve seen with straight-line braking, which is one of our strengths, and high-speed corners reflects the sort of performance we can generate with the nature of the car we have.

"What we’re missing is - we did work on this for 2020 and ’21 - try and generate that performance in low-speed. We know why we’re not quite there yet.

"The car isn’t quite as robust as it is in high-speed in the low-speed corners. A lot of the work that went into the ’21 car was to specifically try and address some of these problems.

"Unfortunately, it isn’t just a silver bullet where we switch it on and suddenly it’s great. It takes a while to get them to work.

"That’s why we knew Zandvoort would be difficult. Equally how we kind of knew that Monza would be strong."

• Read also: McLaren's Key says flexi-wings harder to exploit in 2022

Key believes that F1's technical reset this year, founded on a radical new aero philosophy centered around ground effects, will naturally embed high-speed performance into this season's designs.

But the McLaren engineer thinks the new rules also offer an opportunity to ingrain some low-speed performance to achieved a better overall balance. He admitted however that any performance gain in a specific area will be a relative notion.

"The nature of the 2022 cars means it's probably a little easier to maintain some of the strengths that we have, but strengths are all relative," he said.

"We know that we had certain strengths in our car, but I don’t know where other people will be for next year, perhaps it’ll be a different scenario."

"We’ve concentrated more on trying to have a more balanced car through various different conditions than we would have had now.

"That is what we would have wanted to do had the regs stay the same, the same process but done differently due to the regulations."

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