F1 2024: McLaren

After roaming Formula 1’s wilderness for more than a decade, McLaren is finally going places. It’s not back in the promised land yet, but one of F1’s greatest teams is close to recapturing past glories and re-emerging as a regular winner. It would be premature to back it for a title tilt this year, although it’s not impossible, but victories should be on the cards and the tantalising signs that it could soon be a championship-winning force are clear.

McLaren’s astonishing turnaround from backmarker to podium regular last year was a canary in the coalmine, warning its rise should be taken seriously. At times, it was Red Bull’s closest threat, with a car that flew on high-speed tracks such as Silverstone, Suzuka and Qatar, but confidence in McLaren’s revival is rooted in more than just a strong half-season. Its form was a manifestation of a strategic, long-term approach to rebuilding the team from the foundations with multiple keystones now in place rooted in the shock of ditching troubled Honda propulsion for Renault in 2018. That laid bare McLaren’s own technical weaknesses, shattering the confidence it was producing good cars let down by uncompetitive engines.

Gradually, the building blocks have been put in place that should coalesce into a winning team. Zak Brown kicked off the process, recruiting Andreas Seidl as team principal and James Key as technical director once the scale of its malaise became clear in the first half of 2018. Both made a big contribution to the progress made in the years that followed, with Seidl driving the switch to Mercedes engines and convincing the board to spend on some big-ticket infrastructure items. They have since departed, both joining Sauber, with Andrea Stella taking over as team principal.

Stella, who joined McLaren from Ferrari in 2015, was a low-profile gem before his sudden push to prominence and has proved himself a leader both capable of inspiring his troops and directing things with great clarity. Changes driven by Stella have acted as a catalyst for the next phase of a McLaren recovery in danger of stalling, meaning it now appears an increasingly serious medium-term threat to Red Bull.

The highest-profile strength is the driver roster, according to Max Verstappen “the best driver line-up out of all of them”. Lando Norris recently signed a deal keeping him at the team for an unspecified long-haul, while Oscar Piastri’s stellar rookie season was rewarded with a contract to the end of 2026 last September. Neither has a grand prix victory to their name, although Piastri did win the Qatar sprint last year, but if the McLaren is capable of it they should correct that this year.

“The relationship between Lando and Oscar is a point of strength,” says Stella. “The two have almost complementary characteristics from a driving point of view, which means from free practice one, looking at each other’s overlays, they can pick out ‘I can do better here’. This has contributed to picking up [performance] over weekends. There’s a lot to cash in through the collaboration of drivers.”

Provided, that is, the battle for supremacy doesn’t become counterproductive. That’s why Stella stresses the value of the collaboration given the potential for this duo becoming fractious, which there’s always a risk of in a front-running team. Norris had the clear edge in 2023, but Piastri will improve after his convincing rookie season, meaning this could be a combustible combination as both will see themselves as the team’s long-term top dog. Managing them could be a big test of Stella, but he proved at Monza last year with his public criticism of the pair after inconsequential on-track contact – “this is not acceptable… there should never, ever, be contact between two McLaren cars” – he won’t shy away from it.

Technically, McLaren is closer to F1’s cutting edge than it has been for 20 years thanks to prodigious investment in infrastructure. The crowning glory is the new wind tunnel at MTC, replacing the facility it forsook in 2010 in favour of renting one of Toyota’s Cologne wind tunnels. This improves its understanding of off-body airflow and higher-fidelity simulation of real-world track conditions. There’s also an improved machine shop, new composites facility and driver-in-loop simulator.

McLaren’s human resources have also been augmented with a newly formed technical director triptych. The arrival of Rob Marshall, from Red Bull, and David Sanchez, from Ferrari in January to join long-standing aero specialist Peter Prodromou means only now is this structure fully populated. This is all about avoiding the risk of a technical director becoming weighed down – “diluted” as Stella says – by the scale of the job and is conceived to encourage creativity. Stella sees Adrian Newey, who provides this at Red Bull, as a “special case”, but believes the effect can be matched by the triple technical leadership McLaren now has. Each has a clear area of responsibility – Prodromou, aerodynamics, Sanchez, car concept and performance, Marshall, engineering and design. This should not only mean fruitful development in the short term, but also equips McLaren for more effective long-term planning.

“We are already setting the basis for how we evolve the ’24 car into the ’25”

“We have the 2024 car, then we are already setting the basis for how we evolve the ’24 into the ’25, and then there’s a 2026 project with new regulations,” says Stella. “There’s so much work we need to go through that it’s very important to have these high-calibre [individuals] leading their respective technical areas. This means we have the capacity, the capability, the competence to approach these three big projects with the horsepower to compete at the top of Formula 1.”

The upturn of 2023 feeds into this year with the evolutionary McLaren-Mercedes MCL38. The need for a fundamental change in floor concept was identified in December 2022, too late for the start of the season, but made its debut in Azerbaijan in April. It wasn’t until another upgrade was introduced in Austria in early July that McLaren’s competitiveness was transformed, augmented in September with another step. The changes followed Red Bull’s lead, but the pace uptick showed McLaren really understood how to make that concept work. According to Stella, this path continues to yield significant development gains.

“We don’t see diminishing returns,” says Stella. “This has to be proven once we put the car on the ground, but when it comes to wind tunnel and CFD development, the gradient we established last year that led to the Austria and Singapore developments can be maintained. That’s where I’d expect the car to be at the start of the season. And in the background, we’re working on developments we hope to bring relatively soon in-season that seem quite interesting.”

This is not only the result of new recruits and improved facilities, but also changes in methodologies. Data doesn’t give answers, it’s how you interpret it and there has been a change in the numbers McLaren is pursuing. That’s vital for the current cars, for which the interaction of the aerodynamics and the mechanical platform is critical.

Given McLaren Racing is also, as Stella puts it, “fiscally very healthy”, it has everything it needs to roll back the years and create new chapters for the legendary story of a team that had lost its lustre. The question now is whether it can make the final step.

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Lando Norris

Almost the finished item, a tweak in temperament could bring a first race win

The Lando Norris doubters commonly cite two criticisms. The first is his failure to win a grand prix, and the second his qualifying-lap errors.

The lack of wins is easy to explain. McLaren has won just once in Norris’s five seasons there, Daniel Ricciardo’s against-the-run-of-play victory at Monza in ’21. Norris then had the following race at Sochi in the bag before late rain and a costly failure to pit. While it’s true his radio communications style left a lot to be desired, his judgement that the track was not too wet was sound and it was McLaren’s failure to spot a second bank of rain hot on the heels of the first that did the damage. Lewis Hamilton shared Norris’s opinion, but the difference was Mercedes ordered him to pit. Norris is hardly leaving wins on the table regularly, with his tally of 12 podium finishes without a win reflecting consistently strong performances in often-decent, but not great, machinery.

The qualifying mistakes are more concerning. Team principal Andrea Stella has warned Norris must learn when to drive within himself and avoid the dangers of reaching for perfection. However, what Norris calls the “knife-edge” characteristics that have long made the McLaren one of the most difficult cars on the limit, also play a part.

“There’s various things in terms of how I drive, how I work at extracting the performance during laps, understanding these traits and then putting them to the test on the simulator and trying to improve them,” says Norris of his efforts to tackle this. “Sometimes it’s hard to improve until you’re actually in the car but what I can do, even if it’s mental things, I’ve done.”

How much is down to the car’s peculiarities, now hopefully eliminated, and how much down to Norris over-reaching is difficult to calculate. But it’s a key test of his mental strength and precision, which are rare areas where he hasn’t yet confirmed his excellence.

If the McLaren is good enough, Norris will win races. If he can cut out those small errors, then he has all the qualities to be a champion.

 

Oscar Piastri

Viewed as McLaren’s number two driver, but for how much longer?

If you had to pick one word to describe Oscar Piastri’s public persona, it would be taciturn. Last year, he was the most controversial F1 rookie in history after the wrangling over his contractual status – and it’s important to stress the contract recognitions board ruled emphatically that he was indeed free to join McLaren despite Alpine’s remonstrations – so it’s understandable he let his driving do the talking. It did more; it shouted his qualities.

From the start, McLaren could see Piastri was capable of being every bit as fast as Norris. Usually, it would just be a corner here or there in qualifying that let him down. Although the average deficit was 0.192sec over the season, Piastri outqualified Norris seven times and became a regular threat late in the season. Where Norris had the edge was on race pace, particularly when tyre degradation was a dominant factor. That’s something Piastri is working on and will inevitably come with experience. His tendency to turn possible weaknesses into strengths suggests he will master that soon enough.

But he has one advantage over Norris insofar as he’s an F1 race winner already, albeit ‘only’ in last year’s Qatar sprint. It proved he has the steel to cut it under pressure at the front.

“The proud thing was we had the opportunity to win the sprint and were able to convert,” says Piastri of that victory. “There were a bunch of safety car restarts, Max was well and truly there and we managed to beat him, so that was a very proud moment and a confidence boost.”

Piastri, who has the ideal manager in Mark Webber, talks of McLaren having reason for optimism given its strong form at the back end of last year. He will expect to have a shot at more wins – proper ones – and you can be certain he privately sees himself as a potential usurper, able to seize the initiative in what has become Norris’s team. That means we should expect fireworks from a driver who will take enormous confidence from a compelling rookie season.