Wind tunnel delays McLaren’s improvements
The British team finished 5th in the Constructors' World Championship. However, it was unable to exploit its single-seater as it would have liked, and its backwardness in terms of infrastructure is likely to penalize it for 2023.
McLaren fought against Alpine for the 4th place in the constructor championship this season. However, this only happened because the French team faced numerous reliability issues throughout the championship.
A significant technological delay
The English team has struggled this season, as they failed to exploit the new aerodynamic concept introduced in 2022. Despite numerous improvements made throughout the season, they were unable to achieve a significant performance gain. The technological gap with other teams, particularly in terms of wind tunnel testing, is significant. Andreas Seidl expects a challenging 2023 season for McLaren, especially with the addition of their new recruit, Oscar Piastri.
We know that we still have deficits, big deficits, especially on the infrastructure side for the development of the car for next season.
Our new wind tunnel will not be completed until the middle of next year and our new simulator will not be completed until the middle of next year.
This simply means that if the teams that finished ahead of us in the constructors’ championship this year, and even the teams that are behind us but make use of state-of-the-art infrastructure like Sauber or Aston Martin, who use Mercedes’ wind tunnel, if they do the same work as us, there is a realistic chance that they will finish ahead of us because we have these limitations.
