McLaren F1 director Andrea Stella has revealed the car upgrades for the second half of the season.
McLaren and the rest of the grid are aware of new car regulations that will come into effect from next season. So most teams are going to focus on next season’s car, and do little to upgrade the current one. However, McLaren will not be one of those teams, and Stella has revealed that their team plans on upgrading their current car.
The MCL35 will undergo some modifications for the second half of the season, so the team can try and push for P3 in the Constructor’s Championship and beat Ferrari to it. When asked if there would be any upgrades, Stella answered in the positive.
“They will not be the last upgrades for this season,” Stella said.
“Simply because when you release upgrades, then it takes some time to produce them and learn the trackside, so there will be a few more. Also in F1, you always keep acquiring some information once you test the parts at trackside, because you never get a perfect correlation with the development tools.
“So once you test some upgrades trackside, you normally get information for further fine-tuning, which doesn’t necessarily require to go past the wind tunnel,” he concluded.
Battle lines
McLaren’s age-old rivalry with Ferrari is shaping up again, this time for third place in the Constructor’s Championship. They want to stick it to the Italian outfit. With the news that they will also consider upgrades, the Woking team will not want to get left behind.
Lando Norris and Daniel Ricciardo will want the best possible weapon to use against the rest of the grid, and McLaren will be keen to provide it.
Once the second half begins, it will be a fun watch. Upgrade versus upgrade should give some great moments between Ferrari and McLaren.
‘Special adjustment for Ricciardo’
Stella spoke about how Daniel Ricciardo’s first half of the season.
“The car has some characteristics that make it very special to drive, which we see with the experience Daniel is going through because he came from the opposite end in terms of how you would like to drive a Formula 1 car”, Stella said.
“Our car requires some special adaptation. It’s no secret that our car is good in high-speed corners and may not be the best car when you have to roll speed in mid-corner.
“We are trying to adjust some of the characteristics to make it a little bit more manageable to drive. At the same time, the important thing to deliver is aerodynamic efficiency, even if we couldn’t necessarily improve in terms of balance and [driver] exploitation of the car.”
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