McLaren F1 brought a very visible evolution to its MCL36 at the French Grand Prix, with sidepods largely inspired by what has been seen on the Alpine A522 before. James Key, the technical director, explains how the Woking team have thought about this development, which follows directly on the new things brought to Barcelona.
“The new pieces are sort of a logical progression from the last big evolution we brought to Barcelona” said Key. “The bodywork might look very different, but in fact it follows similar themes. So it’s kind of an evolution of what we’ve been doing.”
“We had very, very good feedback on Friday. The data confirms that the car seems to be doing what we expected. I think racing with both on Friday allowed Lando [Norris] to really see the differences, and report the differences he could feel.”
“The conditions, from morning to afternoon, were pretty similar. And he came back with some very useful data on that, and then he rode all the way to get the mileage and the first feedback. So, So far, so good.”
“We all know what we want to do”
Key explains how teams work to better solve problems and get the most out of cars. There does not seem to be a miracle recipe, as the Briton explains, since the very different F1-75 and RB18 are very similar in performance.
“We all know what we want to do with our cars. What’s hard is doing it. We also have a ton of data on our car. We can understand where the deficiencies are and relate driver feedback what the car does, as well as its strengths.”
“But obviously we attack the problems as our main objective. And we can see and feel what we have to do next. There are two teams dominating this year, and we can see that the performances of Red Bull and Ferrari are quite different, even if it results in a similar level of competitiveness.”
“With a lot of analysis, we can get an idea of what we should try to achieve and, by taking the current situation, with this evolution proving certain things, we can see where we should go. Write a notebook charging for it is the easy part. Getting there, is what we’re trying to do.”
Key is reassured about the new pontoons
The new MCL36 sports pontoons descending towards their rear part, like what we see at Red Bull or Alpine. Although other teams sport flat sidepods, Key isn’t worried about going downwashed.
“I had plans to do a bodyshell with a lot of downwashing for a long time. We potentially could have launched it, but for various reasons we didn’t do it at the time, and there are several reasons for that, which I will not go into detail.
“But yeah, it was good to see that other teams had taken a similar approach to what we originally thought and came up with. There’s kind of a trend with these flatter sidepods. Ferrari really came up with the most extreme example of that, but the philosophy with downwashing seems like a good compromise for that.”
“That’s where we got to, but it had been planned for a while. And it’s good to see that it’s tended to do what we expected. And as far as aero consistency goes, I think the car is doing what it needs to do.”