Piola: Did Barcelona upgrades have an impact?

As is tradition, the Spanish Grand Prix offered a smorgasbord of upgrades from Formula 1 teams; the first European round of the season is usually brimming with new parts to talk about, thanks to the teams' relatively close proximity to the Barcelona circuit.

With the number of new parts probably well into the hundreds across the grid, it's difficult to home in on the most interesting - especially since the largest updates have been discussed previously.

Giorgio Piola's illustrations from the weekend detail some of the new parts brought to Spain, as the field enjoyed its biggest off-track battle so far. But which of the updates actually worked?

Improved pace for Haas - but is it a one-off?

The Haas team returned to the points for the first time since the season opener in Australia, having found an extra level of performance in Spain. So far, Haas has endured multiple struggles to bring its tyres into the optimum operating window over a race distance, but the higher-energy Barcelona circuit subjected the tyres to greater loads - playing into the hands of Haas.

To bolster that, the team also brought a new aerodynamic package to the table. In addition to a new rear wing, Haas also reworked its turning vane geometry on the underside of the chassis bulkhead.

A quartet of fins was added to divert a greater amount of flow outwards, driving clean airflow behind the tyre to claim the space that the tyre wake would ordinarily occupy. This assists the bargeboards in diverting that wake away from the floor, boosting the downforce produced by the underbody.

Team principal Gunther Steiner mentioned after qualifying that the upgrade package had worked, but said there was still work to be done in the post-race test to understand the issues with the tyres.

Having run a back-to-back Friday practice plan, with Kevin Magnussen in the old specification VF-19, the team suspected that its performance at Barcelona would have been strong regardless.

"I think the upgrades work pretty well," said Steiner, "and we have also got two days of testing so we can work on them more and understand them a lot better - which is a good thing.

"If you asked me the difference between here and Baku, it's nothing. Yeah, we've got the upgrade kit, but we ran Magnussen on Friday in the old car and it worked pretty well as well. So we know there is nothing in there, the new one is better and has more pace but the tyres worked also on the old one so nothing has changed - but with the tyres, we can just switch them on here. The only thing that's changed is the circuit."

What's next to come from Haas, then? The team is well aware that there's no silver bullet with fixing its tyre woes, and that there's still no further clue behind the root cause of the problem. But, Steiner intimates, his outfit isn't the only one to suffer in that particular ballpark.

"If we could understand [the problems] then we would know what to do - but we don't, so we need to do more of it. If you don't know what to do, just do more, try different things.

"People are working on it, and we try to understand it, but I don't think we are the only ones who are struggling to understand them. It's a little bit up and down the pitlane, everybody tries to understand and put science behind it, why they are doing what they are doing."

McLaren's biggest upgrade so far

As we analysed earlier in the weekend, McLaren had multiple new parts at Barcelona - a race that ultimately yielded a strong eighth-place finish with Carlos Sainz Jr.

A completely reshuffled bargeboard package linked up with a new set of turning vanes to better deal with the wake pouring off the front tyres.

Along the top edge of the bargeboard, the intertwining scale-like pieces pointed at a greater desire to pull airflow downwards toward the sidepod undercut, and the turning vanes were far less spartan compared to those used so far - increasing the tyre wake management opportunities for the aerodynamicists.

But the attention was on the new front wing package. McLaren, having done the first four rounds with a relatively conservative design, has now drifted into the camp occupied by Ferrari and Alfa Romeo, creating an anhedral arrangement to boost the outwash profile of the front wing flow.

In Piola's illustration, the new design is on top, with the old wing below. This older specification used the outboard section a lot more to develop downforce and, while the difference in sections either side of the flap adjuster can be seen, it's nowhere near as aggressive in intent compared to the new design.

Here, the mainplane has been changed to fold downwards at the end, sitting much lower on the endplate. This means there's less scope to use the lip on the inside of the endplate to generate any outwardly-moving vortices, placing the onus more on the footplate - which has also been reprofiled to better control those rotational flows underneath.

But that outwash effect is concentrated on the top side, whereas the wing elements on the outside are mounted closer together. This means the inboard section has to create the lion's share of downforce, and the top three elements extend further down to redefine the vortex produced by the tips. The flap adjuster and tyre sensor have also been moved.

Despite those upgrades, and the addition of a larger fin atop the engine cover, Sainz pinpointed struggles in sector three as McLaren's weakest link - the team still unable to find enough downforce in the low-speed sectors.

"I was struggling in the final sector, with the rear end and the wind," explained Sainz. "No feeling with the car at all, just complaining the whole race with the rear.

"We learned we need to improve in the low-speed in the final sector. We're not very strong there. Not much more. I think the balance was not right in the car, so we need to check something massively, we need to find out why the pace was not there - but I congratulate everyone because we scored."

With Monaco comprising primarily low-speed sections, specifically requiring immense amounts of traction, McLaren could have cause for concern - but Sainz was confident the team could find some extra performance during the imminent test at Barcelona.

"I don't know [about Monaco], because in Baku low speed wasn't a problem. It was only here. I think we will have our chances like we did here. Here we didn't find the right balance in the car for the last sector and basically that cost us in qualifying and race pace, but we will go back and analyse why."

Ferrari's minor upgrades offer little

With Mercedes continuing its 'marginal gains' approach to updating its dominant W10, and showing no signs of abating, Ferrari needed something huge at Barcelona.

It brought a new engine - but arguably, that was the area it didn't need to improve. Complete with a new engine cover, designed to better deal with any airflow shed from the intake, the team looked to recapture its strong form from testing here three months ago.

As seen in Piola's illustration, there was also an effort to boost the performance of its radical front wing, redefining the incline of the endplate. Shifting the bottom part inwards and splaying out the top section, this was included to further develop the current F1 outwash golden goose.

Opening out the space for the front wing elements to usher that airflow around the front tyres, Ferrari's relatively uncluttered bargeboards (at least, compared to its competitors) have less overall influence.

The yellow line shows the incline of the previous spec, and the smaller arrow points at a small lip at the end of the footplate to trip the airflow up - allowing it to be more readily carried outwards.

But Ferrari fell short, and was the third-best team during the race after Max Verstappen bolted into third place for Red Bull. Strategy aside, the lofty expectations placed on the team have not been responded to with updates - perhaps, when defining its upgrade strategy, complacency set in.

The SF90 still seems limited in lower-speed environments - and Monaco will be a test for both Sebastian Vettel and Charles Leclerc to prove that the championship battle isn't quite over.