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.
Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin AMR24, leads Carlos Sainz, Ferrari SF-24
Photo by: Andrew Ferraro
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 make the MCL38 even faster.
Of course, there’s still the risk it won’t work as expected when it does arrive sometime in the long season run-in. And in waiting, the orange squad also risks its rivals not only making up their lost ground but surpassing it. But the plan has clearly paid off so far and has the potential to be doubly rewarding by not hitting the stumbling blocks others haven’t been able to avoid.
The cost cap restrictions are playing a part here. Not only must each new upgrade work immediately in reality as a team’s factory systems suggest they will, but these days there is a limit on the resources spent correcting any mistakes.
Choosing not to introduce a key update is no easy task. This is especially the case if, as has been suggested, McLaren has seen there’s a downforce gain to be had in a floor upgrade.
To enact this course, Motorsport.com understands that Stella has had to convince all of McLaren to stay united and see the benefits of holding such a course. This starts at the top with McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown, through drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri who will only ever want a faster car, through to the squad’s design team.
Lando Norris, McLaren F1 Team, 1st position, Andrea Stella, Team Principal, McLaren F1 Team, celebrate in Parc Ferme
Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images
That McLaren has benefitted from this course of not acting is testament to Stella’s vision, but also to how well things are going at the team right now.
Motorsport.com sources have also indicated that McLaren is also feeling beneficial input from new chief designer Rob Marshall – in adding corrections and informed guidance where necessary to the ideas coming from the team’s design office.
But here McLaren senior figures are also adamant that much of the success McLaren is now enjoying stems plenty from talent already at the team from its previous era.
Brown told me at Monza that Stella has “unleashed” team aero chief Peter Prodromou, as part of McLaren’s technical department restructuring in early 2023. Brown also revealed that Stella “felt he wasn’t ready yet” to be an F1 team boss back in 2018, which was followed by Andreas Seidl being hired instead.
Having felt that was no longer the case when Seidl left four years later, Stella is also benefitting from having worked for longer in various roles just below the top level of team management. He’s been able to see exactly what did and didn’t work at McLaren in order for it to operate as a title-challenging operation should in F1.
Its current team orders saga shows that things are not in perfect harmony at McLaren overall. And it’s now heading to a Baku layout where the squad’s work on developing its aerodynamic efficiency and DRS effectiveness – long-term Red Bull strengths – will be seriously tested.
So too will the result of McLaren’s investigation into the ‘Papaya Rules’ approach agreed in Monza and how that might impact Norris’s unlikely title challenge, against the constructors’ push that right now seems set to pay off with a first such crown for McLaren since 1998.
But McLaren’s floor upgrade resolve shows just what can be achieved with unity and progress.
