McLaren sets sights on May for first major upgrades

The McLaren F1 team has suggested that its first major package of upgrades to the MCL38 won't come until May, roughly six or seven races into the current 24-round season.

This year has already seen a much stronger start for the team than 12 months ago, where a dismal initial performance saw McLaren and its drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri struggling to secure any points at all.

But the first major upgrades deployed at the 2023 Austrian GP transformed the squad's fortunes and they had a much stronger time over the rest of the year, eventually finishing 'best of the rest' behind Red Bull, Mercedes and Ferrari.

Just two races into the 2024 season, McLaren is already up to third in the constructors standings albeit just two points ahead of Mercedes, thanks to Norris and Piastri finishing in the points in both Bahrain and Jeddah.

But whether they can maintain that advantage - or better still, make inroads into the lead of Red Bull and Ferrari - comes down to whether they can match their rivals when it comes to the ongoing development battle.

• Read also: 'Better feeling' for Norris, but still struggling for balance

"We have some minor things that will come for Australia and hopefully for Japan," commented team boss Andrea Stella this week, adding that they would be delivering an improvement of a few milliseconds.

"Then hopefully, within the first third of the season, we will have a major upgrade," he added. "It's going to be for around race six or seven." That would be sometime in May, around the Miami GP or the following race at Imola.

The upgrades could come as late as the Monaco GP at the end of the month, but even that would be a significant advance on last year.

"I think there is margin to understand the car a little bit more," Stella said. "It's very much a matter of upgrades, or adaptation to the track in relation to the track characteristics."

"In Jeddah we had a slightly different approach to set-up between the two cars, and I think we saw some interesting positives and negatives.

"This optimisation is maybe worth like one tenth," he added. "It's not like you can find any magic. We know the car well, apart from this little difference between the two cars that we will review."

Already, Ferrari seems to have made progress over the off-season and its success means that McLaren haven't been able to continue the run of podiums that they enjoyed in closing races of 2023.

Meanwhile the new McLaren still seems to exhibit some of the aspects of its predecessor that the team had been hoping to do away with, such as a lack of top line speed and reduced performance in low-speed corners.

"When you have these fast, flowing corners in which it's enough to do a first steer input, the car responds very well," Stella pointed out, adding that in Jeddah "you'll have seen anybody behind the McLaren in sector one would lose ground.

"When instead the corners are long and you need to really hold the steering wheel for a long time, the car gives up a little bit and we lose a lot of time," he continued. "That is where Ferrari are very strong.

"That's why Leclerc was so competitive in the last sector, just that [final] corner," Stella said. "And the other limitation was still we would like to have more top speed.

"On those two features we were very well exposed at this track," he admitted.

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