The changes edging McLaren closer to an F1 title challenge

Any time you visit the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking, it’s impossible to come away without being deeply impressed by the team’s rich and successful history. Lining the main boulevard on the ground floor are cars that have amassed victories and championships across Formula 1, IndyCar, Can-Am and Le Mans. If you walk a little further towards the canteen, the walls are lined with trophy cabinets, ensuring that every McLaren employee can see the success the team and company have been built upon.

But for a long time, the trophy cabinets didn’t need to be opened for any new additions. McLaren went through an incredibly lean period, failing to record a single F1 podium finish between the 2014 Australian Grand Prix and Carlos Sainz Jr’s run to third at Interlagos in 2019. In that time, the team underwent significant changes in ownership, management, engine supplier and drivers, but at last had some silverware to show for it.

The floodgates didn’t exactly burst open, yet it set the tone for more success. Two podiums followed in 2020, before last year McLaren finally returned to the top step through Daniel Ricciardo at Monza, leading home a 1-2 finish ahead of Lando Norris, who himself scored three further podiums in 2021. Ricciardo’s McLaren MCL35M now sits at the entrance of the MTC’s boulevard as the first grand prix-winning McLaren for almost nine years.

It all feeds into the question of ‘what next?’ For a team that established itself as a serial winner across four decades in F1, while podiums and wins undoubtedly can and should be celebrated, they’re not the endgame. That’s not what Zak Brown, the CEO of McLaren Racing, signed up for when he took over the reins at Woking in late 2016. The ambition was always to build McLaren back up and make it stronger.

Upon Autosport’s most recent visit to the MTC last week, there’s a definite spring in the step of everyone at the team as we near the launch of its 2022 F1 car, the McLaren MCL36, on 11 February. The new regulations are naturally viewed as a big opportunity for all 10 teams on the grid, yet for those playing catch-up – so, everyone except Red Bull and Mercedes – they hold greater significance. It’s the great reset that everyone has been yearning for in F1, paving the way for a more competitive, balanced series.

“Especially with the size of the rule changes, this is a time of year of excitement and nervousness,” Brown admits. “It’s the largest rule change, at least since I’ve been around, but I think in modern-day Formula 1. As much simulation as we have, I just don’t think anyone really knows what they’re going to have until we get probably into the second test.”

Brown feels momentum is on McLaren's side, but is cautious in his predications as the team continues to improve its infrastructure

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

But Brown adds that he feels good: “I feel like we’ve got a great team, a lot of momentum. We’re still lacking some of the technical infrastructure, which is less than ideal, and I think as we get closer to the front of the field it gets tougher. But yes, I’m excited for the new year.”

The increasing challenge as you get closer to the front of the pack became painfully evident to McLaren last year. Brown made clear to Autosport for our 4 February 2021 issue (the cover read ‘Why McLaren can win again’, not that we’re smug about calling it) that just because the trajectory had been from ninth to sixth to fourth to third in recent years, it didn’t mean the next steps were second and first. And that rang true.

While McLaren scored a win and a pole along with more podiums and points than in 2020, it slipped from third to fourth in the constructors’ championship after Ferrari’s resurgence. Nevertheless, the underlying performance and statistics made for positive reading.

PLUS: How Ferrari triumphed in the battle for F1 2021's best of the rest

“We wanted to consolidate the position or the area on the grid where we were operating, so Q3 and top 10 material on every event, which by and large we have been,” points out technical director James Key. 

"We were closer to the front of the field on qualifying and race average – still far off, but closer. Our pitstops were better, our launches improved. That’s what we’re trying to do again this year" Zak Brown 

“We’ve obviously had some great results, which is really good to see. We’ve been a bit closer to the front on several occasions and raced at the front on several occasions when tracks have suited us. I think we’ve seen a good progression there. We should be pleased with that.”

Brown hails 2021 as being a successful year for McLaren in F1, even if it did lose a place compared to the previous season.

“We hit all of our KPIs [key performance indicators] last year, other than our constructor finish, which is frustrating, because that’s the one that you hang your hat on and pays out,” he states. “But we had more podiums, we had a win, we had a pole. We were closer to the front of the field on qualifying and race average – still far off, but closer. Our pitstops were better, our launches improved. That’s what we’re trying to do again this year, is set out KPIs that just show continuous improvement on all those areas.

“It’s very tough when you’ve got the three teams in front of you, not to mention Alpine, which is a hell of a team, AlphaTauri and others. We’d like to get further ahead on constructors’. But I think the ultimate test, the one that’s more in our control, is how close are we to the front of the field.”

Daniel Ricciardo broke McLaren's winless streak at Monza in 2021, celebrating in the customary fashion

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

Norris and Ricciardo will naturally play a big role in any McLaren success in 2022. Norris enjoyed a breakout season last year, scoring four podiums, plus a first F1 pole in Sochi that would likely have been converted into a maiden win had the rain not hit late on. He managed to put Ricciardo in the shade through the first half of the season as the Australian struggled to get to grips with the McLaren, only to roar back into the limelight with his victory at Monza.

PLUS: The steps Norris took to reach a new level in F1 2021

There was a step in performance you’d come to expect from a driver growing in F1 experience but, entering his fourth season in 2022, Norris still sees plenty of room for improvement, chiefly with getting around McLaren’s ‘bad’ weekends. The team knew heading into the season that its design concept would work best on the high-speed layouts with long straights – hence its success at Monza, and why Norris was so hard to pass while leading in Sochi – but it struggled more at tracks such as Zandvoort and Istanbul Park, with more medium-speed corners.

“When we get the car into a good window then I’m very confident,” asserts Norris. “Like Sochi, for example, when the car is how I want it to be like, I feel like [maximising it] is my big strength. I can really push on it and I feel most natural. But when it’s more difficult to drive, like I can drive some difficult cars, other types I struggle just a little bit more, it’s less natural for me – I have to think about it a bit. When our car has been up and down through the season, when it’s been down, I simply struggled a bit more.”

Norris views the solution to this as partly learning to “forget how to drive the car from the weekend before”.

“How I drove one week before doesn’t mean it’s going to be the same this week,” he accepts. “I think what took Daniel long to adapt to in this car is still not easy for me. That’s shown how difficult it is to drive the car well and on the limit all the time.”

Ricciardo managed to outscore Norris after the summer break, boosted by his victory at Monza, which came after a first half of the season that the former Red Bull driver describes as “almost laughable”.

“I definitely felt like there were a lot of people who had written me off, and I also felt that weekend, something was over me,” he recalls. “Like, I wasn’t surprised with how the result turned out. Even like the fastest lap on the last lap, there was a lot of stuff that I wanted to put out there and I just wanted to make a statement. The whole weekend, I felt like every day I was making some form of statement to myself at least.”

It was an important breakthrough for Ricciardo, who will also benefit from a winter during which he has finally returned home to Australia to see family and friends for the first time in 18 months as he prepares for his second season with McLaren. Both drivers will enter the season with a point to prove, but armed with some encouragement to take from 2021.

Lando Norris and Daniel Ricciardo will both hope to kick on in 2022

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

But so much of their performance this year will come down to the car under the new regulations. The more limited technical freedom permitted with the incoming ruleset is intended to foster closer competition. That hasn’t stopped Key and his technical team from trying to get creative as they look to make the most of the changes.

PLUS: Unpacking the technical changes behind F1 2022's rules shakeup

“You actually get quite innovative at times like this,” he says. “It happened in 2009 when aerodynamicists were wandering around the office saying, ‘It’s not the same anymore!’ and then they all kind of realised there’s a whole load of things you can do. It’s just a bit more subtle and complicated.

“It’s that sort of situation with 2022. I suspect we’ll see some differences, some ideas of different cars. It will be interesting to see what people have done. I think the development rates will be likely extremely high. The nature of these regs are probably going to equal out a bit quicker than what we have now, simply because there’s so many different ways of doing things on our car.”

“We have the team in place, we have the drivers in place, I think we have the resources in place, and the majority of the technical infrastructure. We need the windtunnel to come online for us to take that final step" Zak Brown

Norris is doubtful of any big changes to the pecking order, even as the new rules come in.

“People understand how to make the cars well, and you’ve got a lot of clever people in every team,” he reckons. “There’s obviously things Red Bull do and Mercedes do that’s a little bit better than what we do, and some of those things will correlate to next year still and they’ll still have a bit of an advantage, because they know how to make the tyres work or whatever it is the aerodynamics work that little bit better. But because there’s also such a different philosophy of how to make the car quick, then there’s a new opportunity for everyone.”

There’s no grand claim that McLaren will win X number of races or fight for the championship, as exciting as the rule reset may be. Expectations are realistic and, most importantly, there’s a humility that has been bred by the harsh realities of the Honda era. McLaren went through a period of insisting that its car was great, and simply let down by a sub-par power unit. The subsequent switch to Renault in 2018 proved that wasn’t the case, and that it was a midfield team that had to get over its delusions of grandeur.

It is for this reason that McLaren is not daring to hype up 2022 as being the year it finally returns to competing at the top of the tree in F1. Mercedes and Red Bull have the most to lose, yes. But along with Ferrari, they are also the teams best-placed to make the most of the new rules thanks to their world-leading facilities. The budget cap may have curbed their advantage, but it will take time for that to truly ebb away, even with the reset on the cards for this season.

McLaren's MTC headquarters is undergoing upgrades, with a new windtunnel central to its plans

Photo by: Motorsport Images

And it’s an area in which McLaren recognises it has fallen behind. Brown is quick to note that the technical infrastructure at the MTC is still lacking compared to the ‘big three’, and stresses that it will take time for the plans in place to make up for this to take effect. The new windtunnel is a big area of focus for McLaren, which has been using Toyota’s facility in Germany for close to a decade.

“They’re great to work with, but the reality is it’s probably one of the least current windtunnels,” says Brown. “Given the importance of windtunnels and aero to the sport, for sure it’s a handicap compared to what others have.”

“It’s a bit of a fact that the windtunnel we use now is not as good as a lot of the other teams,” adds Norris. “It’s a bit of an old one, and that’s why we’ve invested in the new one. That’s something we really look forward to. It will be a lot more efficient to walk from the office to the windtunnel instead of having to drive to Germany.”

The upgrading of the windtunnel and the wider facilities in Woking has been a big drive for McLaren, enabled by its fresh investment secured over the past 18 months. In Brown’s eyes, the time it will take for these capital expenditure projects to be completed and get online is the main thing separating McLaren from fighting for championships again in F1’s budget-cap era.

“We have the team in place, we have the drivers in place, I think we have the resources in place, and the majority of the technical infrastructure,” declares Brown. “We need the windtunnel to come online for us to really feel like we’ve got what everyone else has and, given how competitive it is, for us to take that final step. I think we’re still more than a final step away, but that big step, I think we need to have all of our technical infrastructure in place to feel confident that we’re able to take on the other teams on equal footing.”

And yet there would appear to be one big asterisk for McLaren when it comes to competing with Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari: its lack of a works engine partnership. Back in 2014, ahead of its ill-fated tie-up with Honda, then-McLaren CEO Ron Dennis claimed that customer teams stood “no chance of winning the world championship”. It was a theory echoed by former racing director Eric Boullier, shortly before his departure from the team, just months into McLaren’s new customer deal with Renault.

But Brown doesn’t see it that way at all. The customer partnership with Mercedes was something that team principal Andreas Seidl, Boullier’s replacement, pushed for soon after joining, and it reaped rewards through 2021 despite the challenge of fitting the power unit into the bulk of a car designed for the Renault engine in 2020.

Brown doesn't believe customer engine supply deal with Mercedes is an impediment as it moves forward into 2022 rules

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

“I think we can win with a Mercedes engine,” says Brown. “I know for a long time there’s been a theory of you can’t win with a customer engine. I think you can. We’re very confident that our Mercedes power unit is identical to theirs. We’ve not seen anything otherwise.

“You are at a little bit of a disadvantage from an overall design concept, because [Mercedes] understandably get a view of what the architecture looks like. So there is a detriment to being a customer team, but it’s not the power unit itself, it’s the knowledge that you get by having a first look [at the engine design].”

It’s a pure customer relationship. Mercedes’ logos don’t even appear on McLaren’s car or clothing. The partnership has been fruitful for both sides in its first year, and it’s not one through which Brown feels any political pressure, contrary to what he sees elsewhere: “We would never do what I see some other teams doing, which is vote for something that is clearly not in your best interest. They’re solely doing that because of political pressure.”

"I can’t say no to the championship of course, but I’m not going to get my hopes up for it as well. It’s an opportunity for everyone on the grid to take big steps forward and potentially go for the championship" Lando Norris

Brown says Mercedes is “bullish” about its power unit for 2022 following some reliability gremlins last year. Getting it right will be crucial as F1 prepares for an engine freeze that will last through the remainder of this generation of engines – which also coincides with the current contract between McLaren and Mercedes. After that, could McLaren go back down a works avenue, perhaps with a different German manufacturer?

Shortly before the end of last season, McLaren issued a rare statement strongly denying a report that it had agreed terms for a takeover by Audi that would pave the way for the VW Group brand to enter F1, calling it “wholly inaccurate”. VW is strongly considering an F1 entry from 2026, with both Audi and Porsche attending high-level meetings over the next generation of power unit.

“I’m hearing they’re going to do something with Red Bull, on the Porsche front,” says Brown when asked to give an update on the VW speculation. “I think they’ve spoken with a handful of people on the grid. And as you would imagine, we have conversations. But in the short term and medium term, we’re very happy where we are.

“We’re just going to wait and see if they are going to enter the sport, because I think that’s not been definitively decided. If they do, then we have a contract through this term, and naturally we’re going to evaluate where we are and who is in the sport, and take a decision on what we’re going to do in 2026 in due course.”

Brown is coy on McLaren's future beyond the current engine regulations on a possible move back to being an exclusive partner to a manufacturer

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

As much as McLaren has been working to lay the foundations for the future in recent years, Brown and his fellow senior leaders know there is still plenty more to do in the short term. 2024 has been identified as the first year when the facilities should be fully upgraded and online to allow for a potential title fight, but that doesn’t mean 2022 will not hold the chance for success.

“I can’t say no to the championship of course, but I’m not going to get my hopes up for it as well,” says Norris. “It’s an opportunity for everyone on the grid to take big steps forward and potentially go for the championship.”

The opportunities on offer this year will have all teams dreaming of silverware. For McLaren, adding to its recent haul will be a minimum expectation, ensuring there are more reasons for a workforce that is growing increasingly accustomed to on-track success to celebrate.

While 2022 may not be the year McLaren finds itself fighting for the championship again, if it can continue its recent progress and seize what opportunities come its way, it could be another important milestone in its path back to the very top in F1.

McLaren is targeting 2024 as the first year when its new resources will be fully up and running, but it could still spring a surprise with the rules reset this term

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images