McLaren F1 team principal Andrea Stella reckons the team will have a “major upgrade” ready for its MCL38 in the first third of the 2024 F1 season, estimating it for around “round six or seven” of the championship, in a move that resembles the team’s aggressive development plan from 2023, which instantly paid dividends at the time.
McLaren started the 2024 F1 season in a much stronger position than what it had started 2023, but lost some ground relative to its rivals – especially Ferrari – during the winter break.
However, the Woking squad is determined to get back on form, with an aggressive development path similar to the one they applied in the middle of the 2023 season set to start in the first third of the 2024 season – before the eighth round, in Monaco.7
Speaking to selected media after last weekend’s Saudi Arabian GP, Andrea Stella explained how there’s still room for the team to make relative gains just by understanding their new car – but downplayed that to just “one tenth” of a second, and linked the team’s current competitiveness level, with the car as it is, dependant on track characteristics:
“I think there is margin to understand the car a little bit more. Like here, we had a slightly different approach to set up between the two cars, and I think we see some interesting positives and negatives, so you sort of want to make this knowledge and use it for the future.
“I mean, apart from this optimisation, which maybe is worth like one tenth, it’s not like you can find any magic, because we have done already the test, three days, these weekends have been like no rain, so we’ve been on track for a long time. I think we know the car well, apart from this little difference between the two cars that we will review. And I think it’s very much a matter of upgrades.
“Or adaptation to the track in relation to the track characteristics. Like if we go to Suzuka, if you think Sector 1 is similar to Sector 1 here, McLaren will be fast. So we expect that Suzuka will be a good track for us.”
The Italian is adamant that the big differentiator in performance will be the upgrades that the squad can bring to the circuit. He hinted at a few minor parts in the next couple of races, before a “major” upgrade that is due to arrive in time for race “six or seven” – and hinted at it being of similar impact as those big upgrades introduced during the 2023 Austrian GP, which transformed the then-troublesome MCL60:
“Otherwise, it’s a battle of development. And the development may be the very visible developments where you come with an aerodynamic upgrade, which we will declare in the submissions, and it’s very visible. Or there’s some other things that you can deliver from a mechanical or even aerodynamic point of view.
“And at the moment in the pipeline, we have both. We have some minor things that will come for Australia and hopefully for Japan, but they will be a few milliseconds. And then hopefully within the first third of the season, we will have a major upgrade.”
Stella explained how the conundrum of having six Sprint events during the season limits the team’s opportunities to bring updates to their cars due to the limited running on the sole practice session of the weekend. He also mentioned how the cost cap means they have to be extra careful that the parts manufactured will actually give a significant performance impact to justify spending the money:
“Delivering the upgrades, nowadays it doesn’t have to do very much with the logistics. The main challenge is do you bring upgrades to sprint races or not? Because you have like China and Miami, for instance, because you only have free practice one [to test the new parts].
“But then you have another challenge, which is the budget cap,” he explained. “You can’t, as soon as you have something reasonable to production, you can’t [manufacture] like this, because you would run out of budget.
“So you sort of have to be convinced that this is going to be a good upgrade, and then you press the green button and you spend the money. And then I would say the next kind of reason why you don’t bring upgrades to Australia is that it takes time.
“To create a convincing package that is a significant step, it takes time. We are very happy with our development rate. I think over the last 12 months, we see that the development rate kept the gradient.
“So like we pressed the button for Austria last year, for Singapore, then on the new car, and then it’s going to be for like around race six, race seven.”
When asked if the reduction in wind tunnel and CFD time due to the Aerodynamic Testing Restrictions (ATR) based around the team’s finishing position in the previous year, Stella acknowledged it did impact the development of the MCL38 – but he prefers it that way, as it means the team is getting higher positions in the championship:
“You do hit against the limits of the restricted aerodynamic development as a function of the fact that we finished higher on in the championship. To be honest, I hope in the future we will have less and less. It means we are doing better and better in the championship.”
