The restraint unity that’s meant McLaren avoiding F1 2024’s widespread floor pain

After introducing a significant car upgrade package, McLaren dominated the Dutch Grand Prix straight out of the 2024 Formula 1 summer break. That’s a familiar story for the championship, but the details of this case are actually quite different.

McLaren’s brake, suspension, wings and floor edge update introduced at Zandvoort was its biggest package since it’d rather transformed the MCL38 with 10 altered areas, including a completely revised floor, in Miami. But this time, it didn’t comprehensively alter the car’s floor – the key area for adding downforce in a ground-effect era.

But McLaren has been working on this area. It’s just not changed anything for a while because it has seen potential pitfalls in the development data when it comes to adding this work to its real car.

“[We’d seen] that, had we pressed the go button, we might have had some doubts when these parts were tested full-scale,” team principal Andrea Stella said at Monza last time out. “So, we are taking our time to convince ourselves that the development is mature [enough] to be taken trackside.”

McLaren has also witnessed how floor development can have an adverse impact for a 2024 car, even if the design numbers are saying downforce will be increased overall. This is what has happened for several of its frontrunning rivals.

The most profile case has been at Ferrari, where the Italian team’s Barcelona floor update triggered car bouncing in high-speed corners. This robbed its drivers of confidence in such turns and therefore laptime too.

Aston Martin has had to reverse its way out of the upgrade package it introduced back at Imola, which included a new floor, while Mercedes has been putting its latest floor off and on the W15 ever since it first appeared at Spa.

But most significantly for the story of F1 2024 – and McLaren’s unexpected championship challenge – is how Red Bull has been tripped up on the RB20’s development throughout the year. It suspects its Imola floor update set off its subsequent pain.

McLaren, in holding back on further floor development until satisfied will avoid these problems, as Stella implies with the maturity comment above, is therefore benefitting from the stability stemming from avoiding making its current package worse.

In theory, if its latest floor work subsequently comes in and is added without a hitch, that will only…