McLaren hopes to 'lean on podiums' with upcoming updates

McLaren F1 boss Andrea Stella says the team's development programme for its MCL60 will continue to unfold in the back half of the season, with hopes that upcoming changes with shave "a few tenths" off its car's performance.

McLaren began its 2023 campaign on the back foot with an under-developed new car, which weighed in the Woking-based outfit's results in the first part of the season.

But significant design changes to the car's sidepods and floor introduced at the Red Bull Ring in Austria set the team on a much more competitive path, with Lando Norris claiming consecutive second place finishes at Silverstone and at the Hungaroring.

However, while McLaren has improved the aerodynamic efficiency of its car over the summer, excessive drag remains a weak point for team papaya's MCL60.

Last weekend's circuit specific updates – focused on the car's front and rear wings – were able to mitigate this issue to a certain extent.

But mounting a smaller rear wing that caters to Monza's low-downforce environment, while it positively impacts drag, also has an incidence on other aero elements as Stella explained.

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"The Monza-specific upgrades were centered around reducing the level of drag," said the McLaren team boss, quoted by RaceFans.

"In addition to trying to reduce the level of drag, you also try to see what happens to the rest of the car and how can we now start mitigating the implication of putting small rear wings on.

"Because when you put small rear wings, then you reduce the suction at the back of the floor, the floor offloads, and then the whole car kind of tends to ‘switch off’.

"Therefore it depends on how long do you want to spend in compensating the impact of the small wings or how much you simply accept that’s what we have, we don’t have time to do much more.

"In our case, we have been able to produce the rear wings for very low downforce, but we haven’t put much emphasis into trying to fix the implications because were focusing on the first group of upgrades, and then we were focusing on the follow-up to the Austria upgrade that we will see in the next couple of races."

On paper, Singapore and Suzuka should suit McLaren's contender. But the team isn't harboring any hopes of a race win on merit given Red Bull's healthy performance lead.

"When we see the gap that is still missing to be able to fight for victories, you would need at least another development as big as the one that we introduced in Austria," reasoned Stella.

"This is at the moment not in the numbers of what we will be delivering trackside in the next couple of races.

"I would hope that we could add another like a few tenths, but this won’t be enough to challenge for victories. But hopefully it will allow us to lean on podiums a few times before the end of the season."

Stella said that time rather financial constraints are limiting McLaren's margin of maneuver regarding the scale of its upgrades.

"It’s more about time, at some stage you need to start working on next year’s car," he explained.

"Once we started to work on the upgrades, we realised that we do need to evolve the chassis and some other aspects of car layout in order to further exploit aerodynamics.

"So the more you know, the more you know what you can do further.

"After year one [of F1's current rules] there were most of the elements of layout in continuity from year one to year two, potentially because we didn’t know enough as to what is possible.

"Now we are more knowledgeable and therefore actually we are adding work, because we know more to modify the layout of the car for next year and catching more aerodynamic benefit."

McLaren recently brought its new wind tunnel online, having always relied on Toyota's facility in Cologne. Stella admitted that the transition from one to the other was a source of potential concern.
Fortunately, the changeover was a relatively seamless affair.

"We have started working and developing the 2024 car in the new wind tunnel," he said. "This process has been very smooth, to be honest.

"We were ready for having to face some anomalies and scratch our heads.

"In reality, there’s been really good continuity between the work we were doing at Toyota and the work we are doing at MTC wind tunnel, obviously with a massive advantage from a logistical point of view and from a financial saving point of view."

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