McLaren technical director Andrea Stella insists the championship winning team has not taken a conservative approach to the design of its 2025 challenger, with almost “every fundamental component” of its MCL39 being subject to innovation.
Team Papaya rolled out its new car at a wet Silverstone on Thursday morning for a shake-down session with both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri.
“Running in a striking orange and black camo livery, the MCL39 reportedly enjoyed a trouble-free run on the cold and damp track.
But at first glance, comparative changes between the new car and its 2024 predecessor appeared subtle, an impression induced – purposefully – by the MCL39’s temporary livery, created to obscure intricate design details and aero tweaks.
Raising the Bar: Innovation Over Optimization
However, speaking to the media later in the day, Stella made it clear that McLaren has been chasing more than just incremental gains over the past months.
“What we tried to achieve with this new car is innovative. It's a car in which we tried to raise the bar in many areas, including the fundamental layout," Stella explained.
©McLaren
Acknowledging the strength of the MCL38, Stella revealed the team faced a strategic decision: refine an already successful concept or take risks.
"It's something that definitely we evaluated carefully because the MCL38 was already a competitive car, so we needed to be conscious, considerate as to how much we wanted to innovate."
Ultimately, McLaren chose the bold path.
“We actually went for a relatively challenging approach in terms of how much innovation is in this car,” the Italian added.
“This is predominantly to gain aerodynamic efficiency. At the same time, we still wanted to make some improvements in terms of interaction with the tyres, and what you can do to improve long-run pace."
Radical Changes Across the Board
“Pretty much every fundamental component of the layout has been subject to some innovation in order to gain, sometimes not only by marginal gains, some technical opportunities for development," Stella said.
"Everything has been subject to optimisation, sometimes incrementally, sometimes actually quite substantially."
McLaren technical director Andre Stella.
With McLaren, Red Bull, Ferrari, and Mercedes all fiercely competitive last year, Stella emphasized the necessity of innovation.
"We are very aware that last season, even if it had been a successful season, the margins we had mean that we had to be aggressive with the car to try and cash in as much performance as possible.
“Those margins were so small that considering the development that other teams would have had, had we not gone as fast as possible in terms of development, we might very quickly lose any advantage that we had.”
Full Gas Development: No Time to Coast
"We have not changed the approach or the rate of development with a front-loading of our developments," said Stella, who added that McLaren's launch car is roughly what we'll be seeing at the Bahrain pre-season test at the end of the month.
Instead, McLaren kept the development pipeline at full throttle.
"We have just tried to go as fast as possible in terms of developing the car, which means that there will be some updates during the early races of the season, but this would have been the same even without the 2026 changes of regulations looming ahead.
"With four teams that at any single weekend were in condition to win the race, it's very easy to fall from being pole position to being P8 on the grid.
“So definitely we kept full gas in terms of development, and we will see if we have been able to develop more than our competitors from the 2024 to the 2025 car."
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