McLaren knows more about the weaknesses of their F1 2023
The team believes that the Miami circuit has confirmed an undesirable characteristic of its 2023 car, with both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri struggling to find the rhythm.
McLaren believes that its 2023 Formula 1 car, the MCL60, suffered from the low grip conditions encountered at the Miami Grand Prix circuit. The Woking-based team did not meet expectations for the 2023 season, as they initially aimed for a fourth place in the constructor’s championship, but ended up finishing the Floridian race at the back of the grid.
The top positions in the rankings are currently occupied by four teams – Red Bull, Mercedes, Ferrari, and Aston Martin, with McLaren only in fifth place in the constructor’s standings, tied with another team.
With Alpine. However, the eight-time constructors’ world champions have struggled to perform, and their current 14 points were mostly accumulated during the Australian Grand Prix, which took place in chaos and under red flags.
The improvements made in Baku allowed for better qualifications and a better race pace, which seemed to indicate an improvement in performance, but the last race in Miami brought the team back down to earth. In the United States, the team was eliminated in the Q1 session and couldn’t make progress during the race, with Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri finishing 17th and 19th.
Weak grip, McLaren’s major downside
Interviewed about the decrease in performance, McLaren team director Andrea Stella highlighted the difficulties of the car in low grip conditions. “I think a trend is emerging. This trend is that when the grip is high, our car becomes more competitive,” Stella responded. “We believe that this trend is linked to the fact that the lower the grip, the more time you have to spend without braking or accelerating. It’s a situation in which our car doesn’t perform very well.”
During the FP2, the grip reached its maximum, not only because it was later in the day, but also because the sky was cloudy and the temperatures were low. The car was much happier and the drivers could push harder. Lando Norris stood out in this session by finishing 6th.
« If you brake during braking, you minimize this phase in the middle of the turn where you use the brakes simultaneously with the accelerator, and you immediately gain in competitiveness. If we look at Baku, for example, with the new tarmac this year, the grip was high and in all sections where we can brake hard, short corners like Turns 1 and 2, we were competitive. We had very little time where the drivers had neither to brake nor to accelerate. »
