Jon Noble: Has McLaren kept an ace up its sleeve in fight against Red Bull and Mercedes?

It is hard to say with certainty who has Formula 1’s fastest car right now.

Red Bull’s early season advantage with its RB20 has been wiped away, but its pace at Spa when in clear air – and through Pouhon if you tracked the GPS data closely – shows when it comes to tracks that demand high aero efficiency, it remains a benchmark.

However, it is Mercedes that headed into the summer break with three wins from four races, with the Brackley-based squad having clearly unlocked its understanding of the W15 to push it to the front.

But if you want to talk about consistent speed – in all conditions, on all surfaces and all types of tracks – then you should really look no further than McLaren. The Woking-based outfit has challenged for wins pretty much everywhere since Miami, and while it has grabbed two victories (one for Lando Norris at the Hard Rock Stadium and one for Oscar Piastri at the Hungaroring), it could have had plenty more.

Ultimately though, F1 is not a series where how fast you are right now matters. Instead, it is about how quickly you can develop to make yourself better next time out. Standing still is the quickest way of going backwards.

As teams grab their breaths before knuckling down for the final 10-race push to round the season out, there is a fascinating dynamic at play that has all the potential to change the picture at the front of the grid when action resumes from the Dutch Grand Prix.

Verstappen will be keen to strike back at his home event which ends the summer break after a tough run of races and Red Bull's upgrades falling flat

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

On one hand, both Red Bull and Mercedes head into the summer with some lingering doubts about the characteristics of their challengers based on latest upgrades.

A revamp of Red Bull RB20 that appeared at the Hungarian GP – aimed specifically at delivering more performance at high-downforce venues where efficiency does not particularly matter – did not deliver everything that had been hoped for. Considering it was a change aimed at lifting performance at venues where Red Bull felt it needed more potential, it means some head-scratching at Milton Keynes to understand where the team can find the extra pace that Max Verstappen is so craving.

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Mercedes has also had its own upgrade wobble. The new floor that it introduced at Spa-Francorchamps was removed after Friday running, because the team was left baffled by its lack of pace.

With more aero development time kept in its back pocket, allied to a greater allowance overall, there is every reason to believe McLaren's potential to improve is so much greater than Red Bull’s

The early conclusion about the floor was that it was not the root cause of its problems there, and it will return for the Dutch GP. However, there will be a need for some careful evaluation at Zandvoort to be totally sure that the upgrade is not producing some unintended aerodynamic consequences that are hurting its speed.

As Ferrari, Aston Martin and RB have found to their cost at various points this year, upgrades have the risk of delivering some side-effects that can actually hurt car performance. When that happens, trying to get to the bottom of what has gone wrong and why it has gone wrong can take some time. It also means future developments have to be effectively put on pause until answers have been found.

In the budget cap era, and with aero testing so heavily restricted, the damage caused by an upgrade being a downgrade can last for weeks. This is what makes McLaren’s strong form since Miami so fascinating.

Notably, it has actually held back in bring anything major since. Instead, the story of its first half of the season has been about refinement and not spending either wind tunnel development time or budget on major upgrades.

After instant success in Miami, McLaren's upgrade package has proven consistent at every track since

Photo by: Erik Junius

So while Red Bull and Mercedes have delivered big changes to their cars at various points, McLaren has been pretty low-key since Miami – where there was a major upgrade that included a new front wing, front and rear suspension, floor body, sidepod inlets, engine cover and brake ducts.

A review of what it has done to its MCL38 in the time since, in a period when Red Bull and Mercedes have brought a host of big changes, tells its own story of McLaren’s approach. Here are the upgrades that McLaren submitted for the seven races since Miami:

Emilia Romagna – more loaded rear and beam wing
Monaco – more loaded rear and beam wing
Canada – No updates
Spain – No updates
Austria – Revised front wing geometry and suspension fairings
Britain – lower downforce rear wing and multiple beam wing configurations
Hungary – no updates
Belgium – low downforce rear and beam wing, plus tweaks brake ducts

It is pretty obvious that the rate and size of its developments are much smaller than the opposition which has introduced revised floors, bodywork and suspension. It almost certainly means it has been saving to unleash another big step like it made in Miami.

This is understood to include a new floor, but McLaren wants to be sure – in a bid to avoid what has happened to Ferrari and Aston Martin – that it only comes on tap when it is sure it will deliver.

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But the fact that it has kept itself consistently at the front without upgrades not only shows the strength of its MCL38 platform but means that it has also kept its powder dry – so it in theory has more development time and money to spend on improvements for the second half of the year.

All eyes will be on McLaren's next major upgrades and what it delivers

Photo by: Francois Tremblay

Let’s not forget that, with McLaren standing third in the constructors’ championship at the point when aero development allowances were reset at the end of June, it also has a 10% greater allowance than Red Bull. So with more aero development time kept in its back pocket, allied to a greater allowance overall, there is every reason to believe its potential to improve is so much greater for the second half of the season than Red Bull's.

That is something team principal Andrea Stella did not deny recently when asked about how the upgrade plan looked for after the summer break.

“Effectively, Red Bull have taken trackside more developments so far in terms of physical parts delivered, when you look at the submission, than what we have done,” he said. “I can talk for McLaren and we seem to be now in condition to cash in some of this development that we have accrued in the ground, and I would expect that for the second part of the season, we will have, at multiple times, some new parts.

“In a way, I'm surprised that we've been so competitive, considering that from Miami onwards, we haven't actually brought trackside many new parts. It means that obviously the Miami upgrade was big. So there's some upgrades that will come in the second part of the season, yes.”

McLaren’s rivals will be on the lookout each Friday in the pitlane from now on to see how different the MCL38 is – as any changes could mark a critical point in that battle at the front.

Could McLaren's next car updates push it clear of Red Bull?

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images