Lando Norris takes McLaren MCL60 to second place at Silverstone. Lewis Hamilton describes the MCL60 as a “rocket ship”. The team's progress in the last two rounds has been phenomenal. After Canada, they had only 17 points on the board, but in the Austrian and British Grands Prix they scored 42 points – more than anyone other than Red Bull.
This is the rate of development that could have been achieved any team in F1. excited. Lap times depend on the confidence of the riders to push the car to the limit, and Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri did just that last weekend.
There were four key updates that helped them climb up the ranks. An upgraded part on its own will not deliver lap times unless it fits in with the overall design philosophy of the team. McLaren did not seem to panic, despite their problems at the start of the season. Looks like they had a plan and figured out why they were bad.
The main upgrades they had at the Red Bull Ring were on the side pontoons and the engine cover. Then Silverstone got a new front wing and an updated rear suspension. The front wing has not undergone major changes, with slight changes in the central part of the main plane and the trailing edge of the rearmost flap, as well as some changes in the details of the lower part of the front wing end plates.
Modernization of McLaren. for Austrian Grand Prix McLaren Updates for British Grand Prix
The result of the latter was to be an improvement in steering response at high and low speeds – at Silverstone, both abound. In low speed corners, you need more steering lock. At high speed you need very little steering and a stable rear end, especially when braking and cornering. These changes would fine-tune this balance to give drivers more confidence in the car.
The reason for the order of these changes is thought out by McLaren. You might think that developing the front fender first and then what follows would be logical. However, the McLaren originally had a pretty good front wing, and on a good day it's probably worth a tenth of a second. Not a huge amount. It was the rest of the car that needed to be changed to get the results we saw in the last two rounds.
In a sense, they are putting the cart before the horse. If the team had started working on the front wing first, they would have optimized that part around the rest of the car's problems. Get the underfloor, side pontoons, and rear of the car, which are much more important to performance, which I've written about many times, to work well first, and you'll get more out of your new front fender when it arrives.
McLaren F1 changes that brought improvements at Austria and SilverstoneWhat were those changes in the middle and rear of the car? Perhaps unsurprisingly, McLaren has now gone down a path that bears some visual resemblance to the dominant Red Bull RB19. All teams have slightly different approaches, so McLaren takes their own philosophy and applies as much Red Bull to it as possible.
The side panels work with the floor to help create a rotating airflow – or vortexes as they're called. They are generated if there is a pressure difference on two or three surfaces. For example, on a wet day, we see vortices coming off the upper outer corners of the rear wing. They run along the side of the car and help create an air seal in that area during high-speed cornering. Better sealing means more downforce and stability.
This air cushion is much better than trying to mechanically seal the sides of the floor by pushing the car as close to the ground as possible. It also reduces the inevitable changes in ride height that occur when changing speed.
These vortices then travel through the rear suspension, rear diffuser and onto the wing beams under the main rear wing. Better use of airflow means more downforce and faster lap times.
But what we can see in a modern F1 car doesn't match most lap times. The main area of performance gain will come from changes made to the bottom of the McLaren, which (unfortunately) we are not seeing.
McLaren would take the direction from the bottom of the Red Bull.
This does not mean that we cannot guess what they did. I wouldn't be surprised if McLaren took Red Bull's guidance in this area, especially after seeing Sergio Perez's car hoisted high on a crane in Monaco. They won't replicate it completely, but some striking aspects, such as the height of the tunnel under the floor, were probably the inspiration.
The underfloor tunnel height is the lowest underfloor between the side of the chassis and the outer edge of the floor. The air passes through this section in a diffuser – the lower it is, the more downforce you can create, but the more important it is for ground clearance.
The way McLaren worked before these updates meant that they had to go for set-up trade-off: either they had a car with underhandling in corners at low speed, or with a nervous rear end at high speed. He lacked balance.
Some of the performance is lost somehow and the riders lack confidence, which is something you often have to do at Silverstone with so many high-speed corners. Thus, the main design goal of McLaren was to make the car more stable in low and high-speed corners. Thanks to a great performance at Silverstone – a circuit where there is a little bit of everything – they have achieved this.
Given what we have seen, I would not be surprised if McLaren will be competitive again in Hungary next week. The Hungaroring is different from the Red Bull Ring and Silverstone, which are very different in their own right, but it's not the high-downforce Monaco it used to be. I don't see why they can't compete.
Silverstone is a good, varied circuit and if you have a car that does well there, it should do well everywhere. Naturally, there will be some variation at the rest of the tracks due to other teams moving forward or backward, but they can lead teams behind Red Bull and maybe give Max Verstappen a tough race from time to time.
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