How much is McLaren hiding with its launch-spec car?

Having arrested its descent down the Formula 1 grid with an impressive 2019 season, McLaren begins 2020 with renewed vigour and a refreshed paint scheme to kick off the new year.

Conforming to F1's current trends and daubing its MCL35 with a matte papaya finish, McLaren has also upped the amount of blue areas adorning its reworked livery, ditching the tessellating triangles for something more befitting of the car's lines.

It's a duo that has no real right to work; orange and blue are diametrically opposed on the colour wheel and seem incongruous at best. Yet, McLaren's livery designers somehow have been able to marry an unlikely couple and coerce them into looking good on the car.

But you're here for technical analysis, not colour theory.

One element that has emerged as part of an ever-growing trend this season is the thin, tapered nose section. First pioneered by Mercedes, McLaren adopted a similar design in 2018, but the nose has been tightened up even more for 2020 with a far less cluttered arrangement around the crash structure.

In the previous two years, this was home to a central snorkel and two surrounding nostrils, but McLaren has elected to discard these. Instead, the reduced nose size opens up more of the frontal bounding box to a larger cape section.

The front wing seems to be distinctly similar to, if not the same as, last year's design - and perhaps there's more to come from McLaren in that area. The hint is that the team will retain the same inboard-loaded philosophy that it successfully transitioned to last year, and there will certainly be further development in this particular area.

Looking at the suspension, McLaren has pulled a design out of its back catalogue and seemingly included it in the MCL35 package for 2020. The top wishbone is mounted to an extended 'horn' attached to the upright, which was first explored last year in practice at Spa. Suspension wishbones today are developed for aerodynamic purposes along with their usual kinematic obligations, and raising them means McLaren's vehicle dynamicists can work with the right load paths as well as a more aero-friendly solution.

Another area distinctly similar to last year's car is the bargeboard geometry. Opting to show 2019 parts in the front wing and bargeboard areas suggests that McLaren is holding a little something back from its launch package.

While the MCL35, at launch, is almost certainly not the full car that will hit the circuit for testing, it does bear many idiosyncrasies that will distinguish it from its competitors

Those are expected to be two of the biggest areas for development in 2020 before the regulations completely change, and so it's no surprise to see teams reluctant to show their hands at this stage.

Although McLaren placed some of its cooling components below the engine cover last year, it appears as though a few more parts have been pulled out of the sidepod area and placed above the intake in the MCL35. The sidepods are, as a result, even tighter than last year's specification while the engine cover is just a little bit larger.

One visually striking element of that is the air intake, which has lost its oval shape and instead looks a little more freeform, with an additional inlet below the top three to give each aperture a different direction in which to draw air. Some of those divisions will be used for cooling, while others will be used for the engine/compressor intake.

There's not a great deal of difference on the rear wing, with the endplates in a similar form to last year's final designs. The car has been launched without a distinct Gurney flap or any kind of T-wing geometry, but these are all flexible changes that can be added from round to round.

It's also hard to draw conclusions on the diffuser geometry at this stage, given it's almost certainly last season's design, but the number of serrations within certainly serve to illustrate how aggressively the aerodynamicists are working the airflow under the car.

While the MCL35, at launch, is almost certainly not the full car that will hit the circuit at Barcelona for testing, it does bear many idiosyncrasies that will distinguish it against its competitors.

It's certainly interesting to see the tapered nosecone become a greater trend ahead of 2020, and while those ideas will have almost certainly been in development within the teams' factories, perhaps it's only now that the designers are able to make them work in tandem with the car's other components.

From McLaren's perspective, building on an impressive 2019 will be the key target. Although the bitter divorce with Honda ultimately underlined the team's own shortcomings, there can be absolutely no whiffs of complacency if the Woking team is to return to its glory days of old.

With Andreas Seidl in charge of whipping the engineering staff into shape, and Zak Brown continuing to pull in the sponsorship deals, McLaren's future - to use a hackneyed term for all things orange - looks bright. Will 2020 be the season that McLaren returns to the top step of the podium?

Although the new car is a distinct evolution over the old one, there's no guarantee that the team will have made enough of a step to add to its solitary podium from last year. That's no slight on McLaren, but rather the strength of F1's current 'big three', and it will require a superhuman effort from Carlos Sainz Jr and Lando Norris to bat off the likes of Lewis Hamilton, Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc for top-three finishes.

The Norris and Sainz duo seems to be a partnership that breeds healthy competition, and the two's infectious enthusiasm and youthful exuberance will have invigorated McLaren's engineers over the past year. Crucially, while the two are willing to playfully joke around in their collective media appearances, they're also very shrewd operators capable of delivering strong technical feedback and holding their own on-track.

If the MCL35 emerges as an even quicker prospect than last season, Sainz and Norris will be adequately equipped to pick up regular points and the occasional podium.

One key difference that the team showed last year was an ability to take a technical weakness and actually improve it, while the travails of 2018 that dogged Fernando Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne were largely rooted in an inability to cure front-end instability. Firstly, McLaren must prove that the recent spell in the doldrums was an exception, not the rule.

Last year was its highest watermark since its last season with Mercedes power in 2014 and, while the team must be ambitious enough to want more, it must also be mindful that it cannot mount a sustained challenge to Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull overnight.

That said, F1 would be incredibly grateful if McLaren could.

The expert view

By Tim Wright, Autosport technical contributor

This is probably the biggest departure from the 2019 cars that we have so far seen in the current launches. The most obvious point of interest is the front wing, where McLaren has gone more in the direction of - but not as extreme as - Ferrari, with the outboard edges of the flaps.

This will direct the air more to the outside of the front tyre, whereas the inner part of the flaps will provide a strong direction through to the area behind the front wheel and to the bargeboards.

The mainplane outboard section has more of an upward lift which enables them to install larger strakes, again to direct air past the inside of the wheel, whilst increasing downforce.

McLaren has stayed with a much narrower nose section than other top teams, so the pylons are outboard and help direct the air onto the under-nose strakes and under the T-tray.

There are multiple turning vanes and small fins on the bargeboards helping to direct the turbulent air from the front wheel onto the sidepods, which are more streamlined and tighter to the chassis allowing better flow to the rear wing and diffuser through a larger coke area. The engine cover also looks slimmer, helping air onto the rear wing.

A lot more attention has been paid to the rear wing endplates, which have multiple slots in both upper and lower sections to tidy up the airflow.

Small details are to the rear-view mirror mountings, which have also changed ever so slightly with an amendment to the regulations.