Jon Noble: The red herring reality of McLaren ‘mini-DRS’ saga

McLaren’s ‘mini-DRS’ has been a big talking point in Formula 1, but it’s not the big reason the team is winning.

The philosophical idea of reductionism, which is something that happens in F1 a lot, is to try to produce simple explanations for very complicated ideas. The outcomes of wars, the causes of disasters, and the reasons why grand prix cars win races are all too often assigned to a lone decision or a single aspect – rather than being the culmination of thousands of factors coming together to deliver the final outcome.

The most recent example of this is McLaren’s ‘mini-DRS’ – which became the common name for the way in which it had optimised some flexing of its rear wing upper element to open up the slot gap and help deliver a reduction in drag and therefore a straightline speed boost.

When rivals got wind of its existence thanks to some on-board footage of Oscar Piastri’s rear-wing at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, it was suddenly viewed as the key element that had been decisive in its successes since that design first ran at the Belgian Grand Prix. McLaren insisted the gains from ‘mini-DRS’ were minimal but, as Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur pointed out in Singapore, it only had to produce a boost of a couple of hundredths per lap (as rivals suspect) and it could have been viewed as a game-changer.

Not having that advantage for the Italian Grand Prix could have seen Mercedes driver George Russell on the front row, and in Baku that tiny margin each lap could have been the difference between Charles Leclerc not managing to get alongside Piastri as he pushed the lead, and getting his car just far enough up to be able to make a move.

Ferrari team boss Fred Vasseur said: “It's a bit frustrating when, if you remember perfectly the situation in Monza, we had five cars in two-hundredths of a second. You can move from P1, P2 to P5 or P6 for two hundredths of seconds. In Baku, we arrived 10 laps in a row side by side [in] Turn 1. You can imagine that we have a bit of frustration.”

The saga on McLaren's 'mini-DRS' sparked up after Piastri's Azerbaijan GP win

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / Motorsport Images

But while it is true that every millisecond of performance counts in F1 these days, it would be a gross injustice to suggest that McLaren was only successful at those races because of the ‘mini-DRS’. That is not to say there was no performance advantage from it, otherwise McLaren would not have designed it and run it on its car, but the benefits from it have certainly become blown out of proportion by the attention it has received.

Had it been a key weapon in McLaren’s arsenal, then the squad would likely have fought a bit harder to keep it on the car than it did in Singapore when, after some discussions with the FIA, it elected to make modifications to ensure that when the wing likely returns in Las Vegas it will not behave in the way it has.

That the wing was never found to be in breach of the technical regulations, that rivals never went all the way to a protest and that there was no ban through a technical directive shows that this was not something that McLaren viewed as being a hill worth dying on.

It also took some enjoyment from the fact that rivals had got so hot under the collar about what it had done because it meant competitors were wasting time and resource on something that was so marginal. As McLaren team boss Andrea Stella pointed out: “I find that so much attention on our rear wing is just good news because it means that opponents are not focusing on themselves….They're using this time and energy to chase something that I think is a red herring.”

"I don't want my people, at McLaren, to go racing and think, 'oh of course they won, because they have this solution'. It's just such a destruction from a mindset point of view" Andrea Stella

If McLaren wanted to stir things up a bit more, it could have held back for a bit longer on declaring that it would be modifying the wing – further fuelling rivals’ feelings and prompting them to potentially waste time looking at their own interpretations of such a device.

However, such a move carried with it a risk of the noise over the wing transcending everything else – and becoming a distraction not just for the opposition but for McLaren itself – especially if it triggered further FIA discussions and even the risk of a protest.

While Stella wants the FIA to examine closely some other rear wing tricks that his squad has spotted on other cars, he is aware that if a team is to perform in a successful way, it cannot go down the route of thinking that when it is beaten by a rival it is only because the others are doing something unfair.

While Stella pointed out it was a distraction for rivals, he wanted the saga to end to avoid taking focus away from his own team

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

“I don't want my people, at McLaren, to go racing and think, 'oh of course they won, because they have this solution',” he said last weekend. “It's just such a destruction from a mindset point of view. When you go racing, you focus on yourself. This doesn't mean that you don't look at the competitors, and you don't study how the formation happens on competitors, and you don't go to the FIA and say, 'have you looked at that?' That's technical due diligence. That's tough competition that we do have at McLaren.

“But having done that, now we focus on ourselves, and everyone goes racing thinking about maximising what we have, not creating and pumping these kind of stories, which becomes such a distraction for your own team, because they will be thinking, 'Oh, McLaren, they are fast because they have that'.”

This current generation of ground-effect cars are incredibly complex beasts and the route to success is not based on having a clever trick that slightly opens up the slot gap. Sure it helps, but it is not the magic bullet. Singapore certainly proved that because on a weekend where teams playing around with the slot gaps was not really a factor, McLaren was comfortably on pole and in a class of its own in the race.

Instead, success in F1 right now is really about having a brilliant floor design that perfectly harnesses the myriad of vortices that flow under the car. This is a secret world where teams are working in a battles of millimetres of parts differences when it comes to manipulating airflow better – allied to maximising the balance benefits that come from a (legal) flexi front-wing.

And that challenge should not be underestimated because if you get a single element of your front wing and floor airflow interaction with the rest of the car wrong – as a host of teams including Ferrari, Red Bull, Mercedes and Aston Martin have found so far this year – then the car goes awry, the balance is lost, and performance goes out of the window.

It is in having done a much better job here – with thousands of design decisions culminating to create an underside to the MCL38 that only those within the walls of Woking know what it looks like and what it does – where McLaren’s true advantage lies.

Everything else is a red herring.

McLaren knows that the true key to its success is hundreds of development decisions across the entire car

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images