The floor changes defining F1’s best-of-rest battle

So, it’s no wonder that both McLaren and Alpine, who are vying for honours at the head of the chasing pack, are pushing on hard with car developments

Both teams brought similarly sized upgrades to Azerbaijan, which appear to have improved the overall performance of their cars relative to the rest.

As part of both update packages, there were changes made to the design of their floors, with a significant amount of work being done on the underside of the floor to help improve flow through the tunnels and to maximise the work being done by the diffuser.

And whilst this area is hidden away out of sight, we can still appreciate how the changes visible on the top surfaces can have an impact below.

In McLaren’s case, the alterations being made might at first appear to be isolated to the floor edge and edge wing, but definition and contour changes been made to the entire surface of the floor.

This includes the height of the forward floor blister (red arrow), which will have a direct influence over the shape of the tunnel and strakes beneath.

Meanwhile, the section of floor that encloses the lower side impact spar has also been modified, with a crescent-shaped blister shrink wrapped around the safety structure to tighten the floor’s bodywork (green arrow).

At the rear of the floor, it’s clear to see that the interface between the sidepod and ramped kickup has also been recharacterized in order to take advantage of the changes that have been made upstream (purple arrow).

The elongated edge wing has also been ditched, in favour of a shorter variant that still includes the scrolled section (blue arrow). The three vanes that had been used here previously are retained but are reshaped and reorientated to better manage the airflow’s passage.

Ahead of the rear tyre, the floor cut-out has been retained and a small horizontal fin now protrudes from it (white arrow), which is a design feature we’ve seen others deploy under these new regulations, as it can help to adjust the airflow’s passage before reaching the rear tyre.

As a consequence, the rear portion of the floor has also been modified to make better use of the new flow structures generated ahead of it.

Alpine A523 floor comparison

Photo by: Uncredited

The changes made by Alpine are not as extensive but could be just as rewarding from a performance standpoint, given they are optimisations of the design language that was already…