The McLaren crisis continues
While in the United States the McLaren celebrates a more than satisfactory result in qualifying for the 500 Miglia, with all its drivers included in the list of the 12 fastest in qualifying, the same climate is certainly not present in the Formula 1 team. Since the beginning of this season, i.e. in the first five races of the world championship, the Woking team has collected only three placements in the points zone, two of them with Lando Norris. The Briton was the protagonist of his best performance so far with 6th place in Australia (where Oscar Piastri also finished in the top-10 for the first time), which however did not help his team to go beyond the fifth place in the constructors’ championshipmoreover shared with Alpine on equal merit, with only 14 points.
The motivations
One wonders, therefore, what are the underlying problems of this crisis of a team that won 8 world titles in Formula 1, and the answer was provided by the new Team Principal Andrea Stella, who came to Woking this year to replace Andreas Seidl. According to the engineer from Orvieto, everything is mainly connected to non-optimal working methods within the team, which add up above all with obsolete structures like that of the wind tunnel, now in its final stages before the arrival of its most updated version combined with a new simulator, both expected next month.
Incorrect simulations
In pointing out the negative points behind the MCL60 project, Stella explained her point of view to racingnews365.com: “I must say that our model has not changed – he has declared – I know that in previous conversations we have identified the biggest problems in aerodynamic efficiency. If you see the time we lose on the straight, we lose it due to drag. Overall, if you have more load without changing the characteristics, you would go a little faster. But in the goal of creating more load and less drag, there’s this model potentially associated with the infrastructure that we are improvingalso because there are very demanding track conditions that cannot be simulated correctly in the wind tunnel”.
Waiting for the new wind tunnel
As a result, Stella is convinced that with the use of new technologies we can understand the major problems facing McLaren: “The wind tunnel we use is more complex than those of other facilities – he added – While the one we will have available shortly will make the job easier. This is because it will be possible to have a better representation thanks, for example, to the adaptive walls present in the tunnel that reflect what the car sees on the track. Consequentially, the DNA of the problems is associated with some limitations of the methodologies that we’ve used now for years and that somehow seem to continue despite even a change in regulation. In a few months, therefore, we will compare the data reported from the wind tunnel in the McLaren Technology Center with those of the facility we have been using for the past two years.”
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