McLaren do not believe it will be possible to replicate the large steps forward they made with in-season upgrades last year.
After beginning the season off the pace, McLaren brought upgrades to their 2023 car at the British and Singapore grands prix which yielded significant performance gains. But team principal Andrea Stella does not expect they will be able to do the same this year with the MCL38, which was presented today.
“I think this year we will see that adding lap time will start to have some diminishing return, for the first time with these new regulations” he told media including RaceFans today.
“For two years we have seen the progress of especially aerodynamic development being quite steep. But now I would anticipate that towards the end of the season it will become harder for designers to be able to keep a very steep development rate.
“This is why I said before that we can be competitive if we are able to keep the development rate that we have experienced over the last 12 months.”
McLaren obscured some details in the launch images of their car released today. Stella said the images shown so far are “pretty accurate” compared to the real car and “nothing too major” has been omitted.
“These areas, rather than being specific about I will keep it relatively general, but they effectively have to do with improving the aerodynamic performance, improving the mechanical side and the interaction with tyres,” he added.
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“So in these are three key areas [there’s] a few projects that we had started, we saw that they had potential, but just we couldn’t finalise them in time to have on the launch car. So they will very likely become updates for the early part of the season.”
He said the team can add these updates to the car as soon as they are ready. “It’s not that the innovations didn’t make it, I think it’s more some development projects didn’t make it. When you embark in some development projects it’s not like, you want to, obviously you want to target them to deliver as soon as possible.
“But there’s full room in the way we have designed the car for these projects to land later on, onto the car. There’s no restrictions from a layout point of view for some of them to become available. So, it’s just a matter of the time required for projects to mature and then be ready to be delivered.
He said the team has made three major improvements over its previous car with…
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