McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella has moved to clarify earlier comments he made regarding there being areas of its 2024 Formula 1 car it had been unable to address.
The Woking-based squad is aiming to build on an encouraging campaign last term that saw it transform from battling to amass points to being a regular podium scorer.
With Ferrari and Mercedes plumping for revised car concepts, McLaren’s remarkable resurgence has prompted it to be touted as the team best placed to catch Red Bull.
However, Stella appeared to downplay expectations upon the launch of the MCL38 as he stated there were some aspects the team couldn’t rectify fully over the winter.
“There are a number of innovations on the car, but not all the areas we want to address have been completed for our launch-spec car,” he cautioned. “Those areas now become the focus of our in-season development, which is already in progress.”
This time last year McLaren had admitted that it was braced for a sluggish start to the season after missing development targets on its car amid a late switch in design focus.
But Stella has cooled concerns that his earlier quotes suggested McLaren had issues, citing the improvements that it is scheduled to make in the coming months.
“These areas – rather than being specific 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,” Stella explained to select media including Motorsport Week.
“So in all these three key areas. There’s a few projects that we had started and saw they had potential, but we just couldn’t finalize them in time to have it on the launch car so they will very likely become updates for the early part of the season.”
Having revealed images of its livery a month before the official launch of its car, McLaren elected to not run a complete event with interviews as it has done in previous years.
Despite the team’s render images purposely shadowing elements of the floor, Stella denied that McLaren was attempting to hide things from the public view prior to testing.
“We have seen recently that teams decide to have some style to launch the car, like we had last year where there was a show and it was launched at the MTC, live streaming, but we also see that sometimes you may want to have a lower profile in launching your car,” he commented when asked about the process behind its lowkey launch.
“So I guess also these approaches can be alternated over time, and we went from last year’s glamorous one to this year which is low profile. This is not only technical or operational aspects, this is also marketing and commercial. Formula 1 is a large business, it’s not only technical like I say, and we need to take into account all of these requirements and variety of approaches.”
Stella highlighted that indications suggest the cars are beginning to converge regarding certain components, but he warned that doesn’t translate to equal performance.
“I would add that this is the first year of the regulations that we are seeing in the early photographs of the cars, the microscopic shapes seem to be converging,” he said.
“At the same time a lot of the performance is in the details and in the millimeter gain. So not necessarily that the front of the cars start to look similar means that performance will converge, but certainly but these will be a first important factor. But I would expect some of this convergence.”
However, Stella does predict that the cost cap and sliding scale on aerodynamic testing time will begin to have a more fundamental impact on closing up the pecking order.
“The other element is that over time, hopefully we will see, in the interest of the sport, that the budget cap will start having an effect in terms of level playing field,” he continued. “Also the aerodynamic restrictions, because we have to remember that cars that win or do well from a championship point of view have less aerodynamic testing available.
“So hopefully these regulations will allow this level playing field to be generated and this will make the sport more enjoyable and more competitive in terms of results.”
