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Formula 1 teams readily know that if they are not bringing constant upgrades to their cars then that is a surefire way to drift down the order.
But one of the quirks of the 2024 season is that McLaren’s march to the front of the grid, and emergence of the MCL38 as arguably F1’s quickest car over recent months, has come from it taking a bit of a different approach compared to its competitors.
While rivals have been eagerly chasing downforce gains through the campaign with a multitude of new floors – the area of the car where there is the most performance to be had – McLaren has stood out from the crowd.
It has deliberately stuck with the same floor design that it first unleashed at the Miami Grand Prix.
Its focus instead has been on bringing a series of more minor tweaks to other areas of the car – which includes front and rear wings, beam wings, brake ducts, bodywork and suspension elements.
In taking this route, McLaren may be sacrificing potential downforce gains that a new floor could deliver, but the benefits are that it can hit the ground running each weekend with a package that it both well knows and is one that the drivers feel confident with.
And the more the opposition has struggled to get new floors to work properly – with race-winners Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes all hitting trouble at various points – the more McLaren’s approach seems to have been the best one.
As RB team boss Laurent Mekies explained about his team’s plight this year, it is in chasing gains that outfits have struggled.
Lando Norris, McLaren MCL38, Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing RB20, Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes F1 W15, George Russell, Mercedes F1 W15, the rest of the field at the start
Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images
“We started slow in the season,” he said. “We knew we had not done enough in the winter and then we started to pick some low-hanging fruits in car development, and managed to bolt on performance into the car.
“Then, in our development path, in trying to bring more downforce to the car, we made the car slower – which is something that does not happen very often.
“But it’s probably linked to the very last years of these regulations, where everything’s already so optimized that it’s quite easy to break something when you think you are adding load in one part of the map.”
With the phenomenon of floor upgrades not delivering the gains hoped for common up and down the grid, it is no wonder that rivals are now pondering if McLaren’s approach of sticking with what you know is actually better.
Aston Martin team boss Mike Krack admitted recently, that his squad knows it would be “foolish” not to evaluate if changing tact on the upgrade programme is actually better.
“We are looking at this a lot,” said Krack. “If you compare the pace, and you see when have they [McLaren] made a step, and you can correlate that with some upgrades that are declared as we never have the full picture, there is some correlations where you can say, ‘okay, this is what it has been changed, and what has it potentially done.’
“When you see, for example, the Zandvoort upgrade, it’s a bit here, a bit there, a bit there. You see how fine and complex these cars have become, so I think it would be foolish not to look at it.”
Cause or effect?
There is, however, some debate about whether McLaren’s floor approach is actually a magic bullet at all.
First of all, while McLaren says it is running the same floor as it had in Miami, that does not mean it has not made tweaks to improve it.
Cars lined up on the pit lane
Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images
A quick scan through F1’s upgrade submissions shows that while the floor itself is unchanged, tweaks have been made to the floor edges – so it is not identical to what it was in May.
If, as team boss Andrea Stella has frequently said, F1 success now is about the game of millimetres, then fine-tuning what it already had would be a good route to delivering more performance without a major overhaul.
There is also no way that rivals are able to properly understand if the underside being run now is the same as what McLaren had in Miami, or has been modified in any way.
F1’s rules that demand teams reveal their upgrades only count for specific big parts – so tweaking the fins underneath would never be revealed.
Article 19.1 c) of F1’s Sporting Regulations states: “Each competitor must provide a summary document to the Media Delegate listing the name and brief description of all major aerodynamic and bodywork components and assemblies that have not been run at a previous Competition or TCC [testing of current cars].”
There is also another element to McLaren’s upgrade plan and that is that it has had the luxury of being one of the fastest out there.
When you are at the front of the pack, and especially in a scenario where your opposition has made some missteps with upgrades that did not work, there is nowhere near the feeling of outside pressure to make a change as if you are falling back.
So in essence, it almost becomes a virtuous circle that if the approach of sticking to what you know works is best, then the advantage is locked in because others, in stumbling as they seek gains, never catch up.
McLaren chief designer Rob Marshall explained recently that being more considered with what it was doing, and what it was changing on its car, had been a significant benefit.
Oscar Piastri, McLaren MCL38, Nico Hulkenberg, Haas VF-24, Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin AMR24
Photo by: Lionel Ng / Motorsport Images
And that also allowed it the breathing room to ensure that when big changes do come, they actually bring the performance expected.
“It’s nice to be delivering lots of little upgrades all the time…but equally sometimes you just have to hold on a little bit while you wait for a chunk of bits to come all at the same time,” he said.
“The advantage in doing that is that often bits don’t combine very well, or as well as you think they would. And if you deliver them in one lump, then that sort of combination of parts has been in CFD together, it was developed together, it’s been through the wind tunnel together, so you can be more confident with that combination of bits works well together.
“Whereas if you do it bit-by-bit, you might introduce an upgrade on one part and then work on another part and find out actually it’s a bit compromised by the previous change you made.”