Yahoo Autos McLaren developments could put pressure on Red Bull – Stella
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella believes Red Bull could be put under pressure once new developments are added to the MCL38 during the 2024 season.
The 2024 car was launched on Wednesday ahead of a shakedown at Silverstone, and will then head to Bahrain ahead of pre-season testing, but in his press release quotes Stella warned some innovations were not ready for the launch specification of car. As a result, he believes the gap to Red Bull will be tough to instantly close, but is bridgeable over the course of the year given the development rate McLaren has been on up to now.
“I think at the start of the season my expectation is that Red Bull will keep enjoying some advantage,” Stella said. “I say this because they didn’t develop the car very much last year, and I would think it’s reasonable to expect that they will have accumulated some knowledge and development last year that will be capitalized on to the 2024 car. That’s my expectation.
“That said, I think that looking at ourselves, if — and I say if — we keep the development rate that we had in 2023…then I think we can be in a strong position.
“Whether that’s enough to challenge Red Bull and the other top teams, who certainly will have made good improvements, we will find out. We think this is a strong development rate, but as I said now it’s up to us to try and consolidate over time.”
Stella says there is no concern over the fact some parts were not ready for the car that will run at testing, and that McLaren won’t have to wait long to introduce them.
“These areas — rather than being specific I will keep it relatively general — but they effectively have to do with improving the aerodynamic performance, improving the mechanical side and the interaction with tires. So in all these three key areas.
“There’s a few projects that we had started and saw they had potential, but we just couldn’t finalize them in time to have it on the launch car so they will very likely become updates for the early part of the season.
“In terms of the innovations, I would say it’s not that the innovations didn’t make it, it’s more that some development projects didn’t make it. When you embark on some development projects, obviously you want to target them to deliver as soon as possible let’s say, but there’s full room in the way we have designed the car for these projects to land later on onto the car.
“There’s no restrictions from a layout point of view for some of them to become available. It’s just a matter of the time required for projects to mature and then be ready to be delivered.”