Andrea Stella acknowledged the unpredictable nature of McLaren’s MCL60, particularly during qualifying sessions, and warns that ironing out all the kinks on its 2024 contender may “require a few months to be addressed”.
There was no disputing McLaren’s remarkable progress last season in the wake of the initiation of its multi-stage upgrade development programme.
However, McLaren believes that the updates also introduced some undesirable characteristics that made its car less stable when positioned on the limit. Lando Norris's high-profile qualifying mistakes in Brazil and Abu Dhabi were particularly noticeable examples of this issue.
Since, McLaren has made it a priority of investigating and identifying the root causes of its car’s peculiar attitude.
“Yes, we definitely questioned ourselves – whether we had made the car quicker, but somehow slightly more difficult to be exploited when you go to the limit in qualifying,” Stella explained.
“We have looked at, first of all, confirming whether this question was fair or if it was just kind of random episodes but not actually correlated from a technical point of view.
“We think that definitely there’s some areas that we could have looked into, and they affect the aerodynamics side.”
McLaren’s team principal emphasized the crucial interrelation between aerodynamics and ride height settings on F1’s current generation of ground effect machines.
“On these cars, aerodynamics and ride, they go pretty much hand-in-hand – because you know that you would like to run these cars as low as possible to the ground,” he said.
“This is one of the challenges for every team.
“Looking at where the right compromise is from this point of view for instance, just to give you a concrete, real example of where we’ve been looking at, this is an area that deserves some attention.
“There’s some other areas which I wouldn’t disclose just for a matter of protecting our IP, let’s say, but this was one of the priorities of the winter.”
Stella is confident that McLaren’s engineers can prevent most of the vagaries embedded in its MCL60 from finding their way into the team’s new MCL38 design.
But the process of eliminating the peculiar traits entirely will likely run several races into the new season.
“Some of the benefits may be embedded onto the launch car, but actually some of the projects belong to a workstream that may land trackside with some other developments,” he said.
“Some things require a few months to be addressed, let’s say.”
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