McLaren boss Andrea Stella is hoping that the next set of upgrades on the MCL38 should result in a "decent" step forward and one that should certainly be noticeable in terms of their performance on track.
However he also downplayed expectations and insisted that the new package for Miami would not have the same level of dramatic improvement as last year's new parts brought in at Austria that completely turned the team's fortunes around.
Until that stage, McLaren's 2023 campaign had been painful to watch. But almost overnight they became one of the cars to beat, and almost a match for the dominant Red Bull in the second half of the season.
This year has started much better for McLaren and they are already third-best after Red Bull and Ferrari, with Lando Norris successfully finishing on the podium again last time out in China.
The next race in Miami will give McLaren an opportunity to bring new upgrades to the car ahead of the European leg of the campaign, and Stella is feeling good about what they will be introducing.
“This upgrade will not be as big as the tool that we delivered last year in Austria and Singapore but it should be a decent step,” he told the media in Shanghai last week, including RacingNews365.
He said that the new parts will "include some attempts to improve tyre degradation, so we will try and see if we can take a step forward" in the next race.
“It should be noticeable," he continued. "But I can’t say much more than that, because otherwise we talk about numbers that we'd like to keep confidential.
"Let's say [it won't be] as big, probably, as Austria in Singapore [last year]," he said. "But noticeable if things correlate with our expectation with the wind tunnel numbers and with the computer simulation.
“It’s always a big 'if', because even if the hit rate of this correlation has been good over the last 12 months, there's always possible surprises.
"Certainly the next [race] will be another interesting one from a tyre point of view,” he continued, looking ahead to next week's Miami Grand Prix. "Especially if we have high temperatures like we had previously."
If that were to happen then Stella expected "that the track would become quite a bit rear-limited - a lot of traction with low-speed corners and then acceleration."
Stella acknowledged that there would never be a 'knock-out blow' in the development race especially when it came to tyre performance, and that the work would go on non-stop throughout the year.
"This is kind of constant development," he explained. "You never assume that that's good enough when it comes to keeping the tyres in the right operating window.
"Considering the amount of improvement we should do to get closer to some of our competitors, I'd say we need more than one round of upgrades in terms of helping the behaviour of the tyres."
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McLaren, Andrea Stella
