Andrea Stella expands on what McLaren has done over the winter for F1 2024 and how they will probably start slowly and then catch on.
After a solid end to its F1 2023 campaign, all eyes are on McLaren if they can take it on Red Bull in 2024. In order to catch up, they focused on three key areas as per team principal Stella. Of course it is not clear how much they have improved.
From the numbers and theory, it always will seem like that there is an improvement in performance, but only when the car hits the track, anyone will know the step. But Stella is being realistic as of now and not hyping up its situation.
In fact, he has admitted that there are certain elements that they haven’t managed to put it on the car just yet and it will take few rounds into the F1 2024 season to get them on track. “We had three major objectives,” said Stella to media including FormulaRapida.net. “One was to improve aerodynamic efficiency, the second one was to improve mechanical grip and the third one was to improve the interaction with the tyres.
“I wouldn’t want to give any proportion, but I would say that we’ve been able to improve in all these three areas, even though we see that there’s potential for further improvements in each of these three areas. There were a few projects that we had started, that had potential, but just we couldn’t finalise them in time to have it on the launch car, so they will very likely become updates for the early part of the season.
“I would say it’s not that the innovations didn’t make it, I think it’s more some development projects didn’t make it. But when you embark on some development projects, 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 are no restrictions from a layout point of view when some of them become available. So, it’s just a matter of the time required for projects to mature, and then be ready to be delivered,” summed up Stella, who reiterates his realistic scenario of Red Bull remaining at the front and enjoying the glory it had in 2023.
But if the development rate can be matched by McLaren, they will certainly do so in the course of 2024. “I think at the start of the season my expectation is that Red Bull will keep enjoying some advantage,” said Stella. I say this because they didn’t develop the car very much last year, and I would think it’s reasonable to expect that they will have accumulated some knowledge and development last year that will be capitalized on to the 2024 car.
“That’s my expectation. That said, I think that looking at ourselves, if — and I say if — we keep the development rate that we had in 2023…then I think we can be in a strong position. Whether that’s enough to challenge Red Bull and the other top teams, who certainly will have made good improvements, we will find out. We think this is a strong development rate, but as I said now it’s up to us to try and consolidate over time,” summed up Stella.
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