McLaren F1 still has some upgrades to make to its MCL38, but the team is hesitant to bring them in as soon as possible. Indeed, given its recent performances, the Woking team has the opportunity to fine-tune the arrival of its new features, as explained by its director Andrea Stella.
“In all honesty, that was one of my thoughts after the race” Stella said. “We have things in the pipeline and when you have that kind of performance on track you can always approach things from a cautious point of view in terms of development. But we have to trust the process.”
“We have to trust the way we’ve worked so far. I’ve said before that we’ve taken our time to make sure that once we deliver the track, we’ve done the due diligence. So I don’t think it’s going to change our plans.”
Rob Marshall, lead designer, explains that there are advantages to waiting to have several new pieces at once: “It’s about constantly looking for downforce. We like to kind of put the pieces together and throw them in one big shot. So far we’ve just been putting those pieces together.”
“At some point, I hope we have another improvement to make. In a way, it’s good to make lots of small improvements all the time, a bit like our beam wing this weekend. But there are also times when you have to hang on a little bit and wait for a bunch of improvements to come all at once.”
“The advantage is that often the parts don’t fit together very well, or not as well as you think. If you put them out there in one go, that kind of combination of parts has been CFD-engineered, developed and wind tunnel-tested together, and so you can be more confident that that combination of parts works well together.”
“Whereas if you do it little by little, you might introduce an improvement to one part, then work on another part and find that it’s somewhat compromised by the previous change.”
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