F1 | Stella: “McLaren has clear development objectives in 2024”

McLaren's 2023 championship has been full of ups and downs, with a season on the rise after a particularly difficult start due to winter development that had not achieved the objectives initially set by the engineers.

These difficulties led to an awareness of the situation and to an internal reorganization, creating a technical structure with three pillars with clear responsibilities. In addition to this, the team also moved on the market, welcoming David Sanchez and Rob Marshall from Ferrari and Red Bull respectively, thus scoring two important coups that joined the team at the beginning of January.

The new structure, as well as the excellent work done by the engineers behind the scenes, allowed us to make great strides during the last season, thanks to continuous updates that took the MCL60 from fighting to avoid the last rows to being second force in some appointments. Also helping was the fact that the Woking engineers also brought significant innovations to the second part of the championship, but the growth shown throughout the world championship was indicative.

Looking to 2024, the objective is to continue on this path, even if Andrea Stella himself is aware of the fact that, although there is still potential to be unlocked in terms of lap times, it will not be possible to repeat the leap made in 2023 , with a dizzying growth curve. In recent months, the McLaren Team Principal himself had explained that an improvement of around half a second will be needed to remain competitive in the next championship.

In view of the new season, which will start in just over a month and a half with the first race in Bahrain, the objective is to understand how to reach that target by improving specific aspects rather than setting a minimum result in the standings, especially keeping in mind that both Mercedes and Ferrari will undergo a change of concept, with relative unknowns regarding their value in terms of performance.

“I'm not going to talk about how we want to be second, first, third, because that's not even the language we use internally at McLaren. We don't talk about that,” Stella told Motorsport.com in an exclusive interview.

“The results take care of themselves. What we talk about is, 'What do we need to do in terms of aerodynamic development, mechanical development, how do we improve the interaction with the tires?' If you ask any other team, they will give you the same answer: the projects we need to deliver. How do we deliver the projects, how do we make sure we actually deliver what we want? And that's what the focus needs to be on,” added the Team Principal. of the British team.

Photo by: Giorgio Piola

Development of the McLaren MCL60 fund

Over the past season, several weaknesses emerged that the team hopes to resolve with the 2024 car, starting with the lack of efficiency on the straights, which very often proved to be a limiting factor against its opponents. For example, in Abu Dhabi, the last round of the world championship, despite running with a fairly unloaded rear wing, the two standard bearers of the Woking team had a gap of around 5 km/h from Max Verstappen's Red Bull. However, the problem did not lie only in the pure top speeds, but also in the ways in which the two teams approached braking after the sprints: while Red Bull managed to be constant along the entire straight, McLaren suffered a slight derating due of the cut of the electrical part, widening the delta up to 7 km/h.

Although this behavior has also been seen on other cars powered by the Mercedes Power Unit, what they have in common is precisely this lack of efficiency, of which McLaren was already aware at the beginning of the year. To compensate for the lack of aerodynamic load, in the first part of the season the team often relied on particularly loaded wings, such as in Saudi Arabia, where in fact an excellent performance in qualifying was achieved with Oscar Piastri. During the seasonal development, the engineers first tried to add load, which allowed them to “lighten” the wings in certain situations, but the efficiency issue was far from resolved.

An aspect that McLaren has never denied and which he has always spoken about openly in his interviews, knowing that it was one of those limits that they would only intervene on during the design of the MCL38. Also closely connected are the open DRS performances with more unloaded wings, which were not updated during the season. Even in the final part of the championship, in fact, on the two Woking cars there was a wing already used in Azerbaijan and then re-proposed in some events, which however had not been optimized to work best with the latest innovations and to guarantee greater efficiency with the mobile wing open.

Photo by: Gianluca D'Alessandro

Telemetry comparison on the straights in Abu Dhabi between Norris and Verstappen

Another theme is that of slow performance, especially when you have to rely on a good front foot. The lower the speeds, the more the front end of the MCL60 struggled and suffered from understeer, which on several occasions led the drivers to adopt a cautious attitude when setting objectives on certain types of circuits.

Having already identified the concept-level path to work on, as well as which areas require major intervention, the McLaren engineers know well what the development objectives to achieve for next season are: “We make sure that every day take a small step forward. We are increasing the competence, experience and knowledge of each parameter which, ultimately, will allow us to obtain performances in line with those we then want. Then, when we are in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, we will see how well we have worked,” Stella added.