McLaren 'benefits' from poor season start: 'Welcome the extra hours'
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- Toby McLuskie
McLaren has commissioned the new wind tunnel and it hopes to reap the benefits of that from next season. An added benefit is that the team of drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri will have a lot more wind tunnel time than the competition heading into 2024, and they are (by now) not in a bad position at all.
McLaren finished fifth in the constructors' championship last season and was therefore allocated 100 per cent of the wind tunnel hours. However, when a reshuffle followed on 30 June (for the distribution of hours in the second part of 2023), McLaren was sixth in the World Championship standings. So that means the Woking-based racing stable is now getting some more time in the wind tunnel. Indeed, since 2021, Formula 1 has been using an aero-handicap system, which should bring the field closer together.
That the reshuffle took place on 30 June worked out very advantageously for McLaren. However, a month later, the formation was already in fifth place and the way up has definitely started. After a difficult start to the season, the formation has figured out how to make the MCL60 come alive.
McLaren wants to close gap towards 2024
Stella did announce in Belgium that development of the current car will be halted and the focus will be entirely on the 2024 car after the summer break. So those extra hours will come in particularly handy towards next season.
"We certainly welcome having a few more hours than the top teams. Especially we welcome it because it looks like we now have good ideas to bring to the wind tunnel, like as I said before, you can have many many hours in the wind tunnel but the real game changer is the quality of the ideas and the quality of the concepts you put in the wind tunnel development and because now we seem to be in a good position from this point of view, we welcome the extra hours," the team boss said in conversation with GPblog and others.
New wind tunnel
McLaren has now, after a long wait, commissioned the new wind tunnel. This should provide accurate data. Stella is not worried that deploying a new wind tunnel and building a new car (before 2024), will cause problems. "Not necessarily because we have gone through quite a comprehensive work of validation of the new wind tunnel. The new wind tunnel has been designed with some criteria to kind of actually improve the correlation with trackside so if anything, I’m even encouraged by what I have seen so far in terms of the behaviour of the new wind tunnel."