How McLaren went from back to front in 18 months

Lando Norris was fortunate to make it out of the first phase of qualifying at the 2023 Bahrain Grand Prix. He was settling in for his fifth season with McLaren, the team that had picked him up as a junior driver and supported his path to Formula 1, but his loyalty to Zak Brown’s orange army was surely tested when the MCL60 first emerged on track.

Norris set exactly the same time as Logan Sargeant in Q1 but, since the Briton set his first, he progressed into the next stage. New team-mate Oscar Piastri fell at the first hurdle – the Australian rookie had qualified down in 18th for his first F1 weekend.

There was a feeling that Norris was punching above his weight when he lined up 11th on the grid, but reliability was ultimately poor when it came to the race. Norris needed six pitstops to keep hydraulic pressure in the car, while Piastri’s race was done early with an electrical issue. McLaren had expected to struggle when 2023 kicked off, but surely not to this magnitude.

It all seems like such a long time ago. Last time out, Norris took the MCL60’s successor, the MCL38, to victory in Singapore with a 20.9-second margin over Max Verstappen. McLaren leads the constructors’ championship by 41 points, while Norris is 52 off the drivers’ championship lead with six of 24 events to go. It was surely unfathomable a year and a half ago.

In reality, McLaren’s progression from nailed-on Q1 exits to beating the likes of Red Bull has its genesis in a decision taken in September 2022. All teams had to conform to a 15mm change in floor height regulations for 2023, and McLaren had progressed with the design of its new car to satisfy the modified rules. Yet it saw that the direction in which it had gone was not offering the expected performance needed to make the desired progress.

The team therefore had to change tack quite late on into the development process. It meant that the launch-spec MCL60 was effectively still a beta-test model, with a heady upgrade glide path planned for the first half of the year to make the car much more competitive. New team principal Andrea Stella, promoted from within after Andreas Seidl left for Sauber, noted that he was “not entirely happy for what is the launch car”.

Watch: Back in '74 – How McLaren Conquered the Indy500 and F1 Titles in One Year

A new floor for April’s Azerbaijan GP laid the foundation for future upgrades; the subsequent Austrian GP package was extensive and included an all-new floor, sidepods and engine cover. Over the first two thirds of the year, every single aerodynamic part on the MCL60 was changed. And, with McLaren’s new wind tunnel now available, the team got further upgrades for September’s Singapore GP before pinning its full focus on 2024.

There were issues with the MCL60 to iron out; Stella surmised that some of the upgrades had made the car harder to drive. Fixing that, further increasing the baseline performance, and adding some star players to its cast has laid the basis for this year’s MCL38 to take centre stage on the approach to the final part of this season.

McLaren’s progression in 2024

In truth, the MCL38 didn’t immediately present itself as a Red Bull-beating prospect in the opening races. But it became one, thanks to the upgrade package for May’s Miami GP. And, at the 110th attempt, Lando Norris finally became an F1 race winner at the Floridian circuit. It was an auspicious victory, thanks to a well-timed safety car, but sometimes you need to rely on luck for a breakthrough.

McLaren had given itself the car to compete against the best, but it also gave itself these ‘opportunities’ to tighten things up over the next few rounds

There’s a Stella characteristic prevalent here: the urbane Italian likes to frame exploitable moments of a race and points of improvement as “opportunities”. The team had an opportunity to win the race in Miami, and it took it with both hands. In building a car with room for development, there are further ‘opportunities’ to tack on performance. And, when it comes to both the team and drivers practising their craft at the track, there is no failure – only an ‘opportunity’ to do something better next time.

McLaren had given itself the car to compete against the best, but it also gave itself these ‘opportunities’ to tighten things up over the next few rounds. The team could have theoretically won all five races in the Monaco-Canada-Spain-Austria-Britain stretch, but instead those quickfire European races offered no wins thanks to a mix of driver and procedural errors, or through the efforts of other pilots.

The Hungarian GP was probably another turning point. The team orders saga could be charitably described as a ‘learning experience’, but it overshadowed just how dominant the team could be over a weekend. In the aftermath, it learned to minimise risk and be a smidgen more decisive with strategic calls.

There was also the point of Norris’s iffy starts. He lost the lead into the first corner in both Spain and Hungary, and later Zandvoort. Stella noted that this was an “opportunity” for the team to work with Norris, and determine whether it was a driver issue or that the car was prone to bogging down off the line. Norris’s Zandvoort win rather took the pressure off, since he caught and passed Verstappen anyway; he hadn’t got the start right, but he’d managed to mentally devalue it with that victory. In Singapore last month, he got away perfectly.

Stella has had plenty to celebrate this season as McLaren has emerged as a bone fide contender for regular race wins

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

McLaren is now making the most of its car, and its strengths came to the fore in Singapore. What makes the MCL38 so potent on circuits like that is its efficiency – it seems to have found the holy grail of blending high downforce with lower drag than its rivals. The suspension package seems to have the best of both worlds, too: stiff enough to keep the underbody working effectively, but not so much as to completely rid the car of any compliance. That was evident from Norris’s kerb strikes at Marina Bay, where he seemed to generally glide through them without unsettling the rear.

“I think if I look at previous races, at this high level of downforce, we seem to be very competitive,” was Stella’s verdict. “The car has been strong in this configuration. You know, I always make the examples of Hungary and Zandvoort – even Hungary was a relatively dominant victory in itself, like Zandvoort and like this one.

“So at the moment, it’s more than that the car in this configuration, I think it has the better aerodynamic efficiency across the grid. While at low drag, the efficiency of Ferrari, Red Bull is much more comparable to our car.

“We know we have invested much more at this level of downforce than we’ve done at lower downforce, even though I’ve said already after races like Spa and Monza, we’ve definitely made a step forward in terms of retaining downforce when we reduce the level of drag.”

That latter point was evident at Monza and Baku; although Ferrari won its home race, McLaren had the faster car but perhaps didn’t count on the Prancing Horses taking a successful punt on a one-stop strategy.

Stella’s new management constellation

Much of the team’s growth comes from the renewed technical structure that Stella laid in place shortly after taking over. The decision to do away with a single technical director was taken when the 2023 car came out of the blocks in glacial fashion. Erstwhile team principal James Key carried the can, which gave Stella the chance to change the departments in his image.

He began by installing former Adrian Newey acolyte Peter Prodromou to lead the aerodynamics side, and went into the market to hire leaders for the remaining two pillars. And it was, on the face of it, a successful shopping trip: Stella and Brown had courted the services of Red Bull’s Rob Marshall for the engineering and design department, and Ferrari’s David Sanchez to handle the performance and concept side.

Brown has allowed Stella to mould the team in his image, with Marshall's hiring from Red Bull as chief designer a crucial cog in the mechanism

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

It didn’t quite go to plan when Sanchez eventually joined. The Frenchman felt that, in his lengthy period of gardening leave, the role had strayed far from what he was hired to do. So Sanchez left after just three months to join Alpine, forcing Stella to reshuffle again: he’d handle the residual performance duties himself, installed Marshall as chief designer, and promoted Neil Houldey to Marshall’s prior role.

Perhaps it was serendipitous that Sanchez’s hiring didn’t work out, since having Marshall in the more senior role has undoubtedly given the team a clear direction with its development path – and a bit more initiative to truly test the boundaries of the technical regulations.

With the technical side of the team freshened up and firing on all cylinders, McLaren has also given the trackside workforce a boost with the addition of Will Courtenay – like Marshall, a signing from Red Bull. Having served at the Milton Keynes squad as head of race strategy, Courtenay becomes McLaren’s sporting director and will be tasked with ensuring that the team is equally scrupulous at the races.

Chasing innovations through pushing the absolute extremities of the envelope buoyed Norris, who was pleased to see the team rise to the occasion of fighting at the front

The signing of Courtenay suggests that McLaren has recognised that sure, you can build the fastest car, but strategy and trackside operations need to be given the same attention to ensure no results are left on the table. And, when a team is starting to win more frequently, it’s often that they get the pick of the talent in the future. Don’t be surprised if more star names come through the doors of the McLaren Technology Centre in the near future.

Pushing the limit of flexi-wings

Exploiting the effects of aeroelasticity has been part of F1 ever since aerofoils-on-stilts became a la mode in the 1960s. A wing that can change shape and shed some drag in a straight line offers very clear performance benefits, something that the FIA has wished to keep in check with a series of static load tests.

There’s a bit of a grey area, however; wings are not infinitely inflexible, and will naturally bend when aerodynamic load is applied. That’s the area that McLaren has sought to tap into with its front wing, seeking to maintain the requisite rigidity to pass the tests while being able to induce a few extra millimetres of tilt.

The effect was evident enough for the likes of Ferrari and Red Bull to ‘seek clarification’ from the FIA, the usual political rigmarole that essentially tells the governing body ‘ban it, or we build it’. The FIA’s technical department had been monitoring front wing flex since the Belgian GP with additional onboard cameras, but without the intention of banning anything unless any extreme solutions emerged. In effect, Red Bull and Ferrari were told that McLaren and Mercedes – which had also pursued a similar solution – were in the clear.

Piastri reaped the fruits of McLaren's excellent straight-line speed in Baku, resulting from its 'mini-DRS'

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / Motorsport Images

McLaren’s ‘mini-DRS’, however, was not granted such regulatory latitude. The rearward-facing onboard camera of Oscar Piastri’s car in Baku rather caused a stir in the paddock as the lower corners of the upper rear wing flap appeared to shift upwards on the straight. In short, this was producing an effect like DRS, in that it reduced the frontal area and induced a stall thanks to the enlarged slot gap.

Although the wing had passed all load tests levied upon it, the FIA sought to avoid any confrontation from the other teams by asking McLaren to modify the design for future races. This wing configuration was not used in Singapore but, for races such as the Las Vegas GP, McLaren will not be able to reap the benefits of it. Stella does not believe that it’ll make too much difference, but it’ll be a loss nonetheless.

Chasing these innovations through pushing the absolute extremities of the envelope buoyed Norris, who was pleased to see the team rise to the occasion of fighting at the front.

“I’m proud, I’m happy with what the team are doing – they’re pushing the limits,” the Bristolian declared. “That’s what you’ve got to do if you want to fight at the top, and fight against people who are also known for doing such things and exploring every area possible.

“We’ve not been in situations where we could do that in the past but now we’re in that position so I’m very happy. It’s a cool thing to see, in my opinion. There’s so many rules, there’s so many things in place, but teams, including us, are finding ways to just explore and look at different things that other people have not thought of.”

Is there further room for development?

With six rounds left, it’s fair to say that most teams have probably got one more upgrade package in mind before they fully divert resources to their 2025 challengers. Keeping the development going into the business end of the season can yield benefits if next year’s car is an evolution of the current concept, but pulling away tightly restricted resources from the future is nonetheless a risk.

McLaren is currently in the process of weighing up those risks. Don’t mistake that for indecisiveness, however, because it already has new items in the pipeline. Instead, it’s symptomatic of a greater issue that other teams have found with their development.

McLaren now must decide whether to pull the pin on more upgrades and risk destabilising its recent run of success

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull have all introduced upgrades this year that, for myriad reasons, haven’t stuck around. The performance benefits in simulations and in the wind tunnel have all been apparent enough for the teams to begin production, but the deleterious effects of them rarely become apparent until they hit the circuit.

Note Ferrari’s Barcelona floor, for example: the peak downforce numbers were higher in the wind tunnel, but it also began to instigate bouncing through high-speed corners that put the tyres under more varied load. This made the SF-24 much more difficult for the drivers to handle.

McLaren doesn’t want to be caught standing still as, in F1 parlance, to stand still is to go backwards. Equally, it does not want to introduce a new floor that strips the MCL38 of its advantages and sets Norris back in the battle for the drivers’ title. It has already watched Red Bull do that.

"We need to trust the process. We need to trust the way we’ve been working so far" Andrea Stella

Over the season, Red Bull has upgraded its aerodynamics in an initial effort to continue the RB20’s impressive turn of pace at the start of the year. Again, the performance yield may have been evident in simulations, but the real-world addition of a new floor and associated bodywork made the car much harder to drive.

It was assumed that, when Sergio Perez started to struggle, he was simply repeating his 2023 lapse in form. It wasn’t until Verstappen became increasingly raucous on the radio about the handling ills with which he was saddled that Red Bull started to take notice. Perez had simply been more sensitive to the changes, and may have been an indicator of what was to come.

Recent fixes to the RB20 seem to be helping, and any further signs of renewed competitiveness will likely expedite McLaren’s decision to make a final development push. After all, the Woking squad cannot bank on capitalising on a Verstappen off-day if the Red Bull team is back in the ascendancy.

“We do have some stuff in the pipeline, and obviously, when you have this kind of performance on track, you may approach things from a cautious point of view in terms of development,” Stella mused. “But at the same time, we need to trust the process. We need to trust the way we’ve been working so far. I’ve said already that we have taken our time to make sure that once we deliver trackside, we have done the due diligence. So, I don’t think this will change our plans.

If Red Bull shows signs of progress, then McLaren will have a tough challenge in nibbling at Verstappen's lead

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

“In F1, I’m not sure you can back off too much, because backing off means that the others may catch up. And we don’t know what the plans of the others are. Red Bull, we see that in a track in which they thought they would not have been very competitive, ultimately, they were potentially second best [in Singapore]. And I think we haven’t seen Ferrari [at its best], as even in P1, P2, they seemed to be as fast as us.”

Norris is still an outside bet for this year’s title – 52 points is a big gap to close in the remaining six rounds – but McLaren has been on the receiving end of a similar swing before. Taking the margin as effectively two wins’ worth of arrears, you can enter Kimi Raikkonen’s 17-point deficit to Lewis Hamilton with two races remaining in 2007 as a comparable margin. The laconic Finn, with thanks to the two McLaren drivers taking points off each other, managed to sit a point clear after the Brazil finale to take his sole championship crown.

In other words, it’s doable. But McLaren must, in this final quarter of the year, put everything it has learned together if it is to be successful with Norris and simultaneously close out the constructors’ championship versus Red Bull and Ferrari. Who’d have thought we’d be saying that 18 months ago?

Can Norris mount a comeback and dethrone Verstappen in the remaining six events?

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images