Andrea Stella: “practically the whole car has been modified.”
McLaren is experiencing a very difficult start to the season with a car that isn't performing as intended. The Team Principal of the British team admits that everything has been reworked on the car to improve its performance.
McLaren had failed to make a successful transition in 2022, and in 2023, the prestigious Woking team is still struggling to make their car work. Currently 6th in the constructors’ standings with only 17 points, they had to rethink the philosophy of the MCL60.
Important changes from the beginning of the season
Andrea Stella admits that the car needed a fundamental overhaul from the start of the season in order to gain performance throughout the races. We realized that the car needed a fundamental overhaul, so this overhaul is actually interesting, I would say, almost every aerodynamic part, which is why the improvements will be spread over a few races, said the Italian Team Principal before going on to say that it is also for this reason that it took us some time to be able to make these improvements. So I would say that practically the whole car has been modified.
“We even had to redesign certain parts underneath the body »,” Stella also mentioned.
What objectives?
With this work on the car, the team is greatly seeking to improve its downforce. Moreover, with these improvements, McLaren expects to gain a few tenths of a second over its main competitors, which will undoubtedly boost the drivers’ morale. As for the improvements, we haven’t tested them yet in the simulator, but they allow to increase the ground effect while preserving the same characteristics, he stated.
« So we expect an improvement in lap time of a few tenths of a second. And yes, we’ll see, added Stella.
But for McLaren, it will be necessary to convert the results during the races to avoid further disappointments. The team seems confident about future results. In fact, the key point is to determine if there will be a correlation on the track. But I think the correlation has been good so far. I believe that with this generation of cars in general, the correlation with development tools is good, concluded Andrea Stella.
