By Carlo Platella
The 2024 McLaren finds itself in the mix of pursuers together with Mercedes and Aston Martin, however far from Red Bull and now also separated from Ferrari. The first Grands Prix of the year highlighted what the MCL38 lacks to compete with the top of the class, showing its shortcomings on the straights, in slow corners and in the longest corners. The Woking team, however, does not appear lost. In reverse, McLaren shows confidence in claiming to understand the origin of the car's problems, so much so that they are working on targeted updates.
The limits of the MCL38
The 2024 McLaren retains some traits of the single-seaters of past seasons. The car continues to be one of the slowest on a straight line, held back by excessive aerodynamic resistance. They add to this the difficulties in slow cornerswith Norris describing the Bahrain track as “too slow and tortuous” for the Woking machine. On the other hand, in Jeddah McLaren established itself as one of the most competitive cars on the high-speed corners of the first sector, expressing itself best when it comes to traveling close to the ground to extract maximum load from the surface.
However, the aerodynamic performance in fast corners is obscured in long-distance bends, a condition where other problems arise. “When there are fast corners in sequence, so when it is enough to just give the first turn to the steering, the car responds very well”the words of Team Principal Andrea Stella after the race in Jeddah, reported by The Race. “But when the corners are long, like the last one, and you have to maintain the steering angle for a long time, the car gives a little and we waste a lot of time.”
The 2023 McLaren was already showing limits when negotiating longer corners, with balance and stability problems that forced the drivers to row with the steering wheel. The impression is that, once the transients have been absorbed, both the mechanical ones of the suspensions and those of an aerodynamic nature in terms of yaw angles, the car enters an operating window in which it loses balance and efficiency. On the other hand, the positive news is that McLaren, unlike other teams, says it is aware of the phenomena at the origin of the problems. “We understand the root causebut it takes a few weeks to complete the projects to resolve it,” assures Stella.
Updates coming soon
Already during the presentation, the Team Principal explained how the team had postponed some new features, with the aim of taking all the time necessary to complete them: “There are a number of innovations in the car, but not all the areas we wanted to address were completed for the launch version. Those areas now become the subject of our seasonal development, which is already underway.”
The Team Principal himself described the updates in the pipeline as both aerodynamic and mechanical in nature. Since then, however, the Umbrian engineer has never clarified whether the mechanical innovations concern the front impact structure (the nose), the suspensions or rather a new arrangement of the components under the bonnet, useful for designing a bodywork with more aggressive shapes. To find out we will have to wait for the package's debut on the track, expected in the first quarter of the championship between the Miami and Imola races.
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