McLaren is downplaying hopes that its Azerbaijan Grand Prix upgrade will see a significant improvement in performance as it attempts to recover from a slow start to the season.
Woking has slipped backwards in the second year of the new regulations after debuting an underdeveloped car at the first three races of the year.
The team confessed that it had underestimated the effect of a tweak to the regulations that raised the edge of the floor this season, forcing it to change development directions months after stating work on this year’s car.
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The car fielded before this weekend was the model that had had development switched off, with the ‘real’ 2023 car due to arrive via an upgrade in Baku.
But McLaren, which has become increasingly uncompetitive relative to the front of the midfield in the last two seasons, has cautioned against expecting a major step forward, with Lando Norris saying the team is still effectively two months behind the development curve.
“What we have now is … what we should have started the year with,” Norris said. “A lot of other teams also have upgrades, so our job is to try and bring slightly bigger things and try to play a little bit of catch-up.
“I think what we have this weekend is just the baseline we should have started the year with, and it‘s about understanding what we have now.”
Piastri said the update also isn’t supposed to make a notable difference to the way the notoriously tricky car handles.
“I don’t think it should impact the behaviour of the car too much,” he said. “Hopefully it just makes us quicker. That’s the plan.
“It shouldn’t drastically change the balance of the car, from what we’re anticipating.”
The tempered expectations stem back to the changes McLaren has made to its technical structure, having sacked James Key last month and replaced him with three people responsible for different aspects of the design process.
The inquest was undertaken by new team principal Andrea Stella, who said the previous structure had become too slow to move.
While this Baku upgrade should rectify the mistakes made last year, it’s still the product of the old Key-led organisation; the new technical model won’t have its effects felt until later in the season.
“The model changes will affect the delivery of performance because it will accelerate the development rate, and I think that we will see the impact,” he said. “Not in Baku obviously, because what comes in Baku was released in design like two months ago, but it definitely will impact the next round of upgrades.
“The improvement in Baku should affect an area of the car that — as has been clear I think from the presentation of the car — we weren’t entirely happy with in terms of development.”
Stella said the team had already charted a course for two more major upgrades for the rest of the season, with one due in the months before the August break highlighted as being particularly significant.
“We would expect definitely another major upgrade, which will interest more areas of the car,” he explained. “It will be much more apparent — that is what somebody may call kind of a B-spec car.
“And then we expect to have a further round of upgrades in the second part of the season after the shutdown.
“So we have three main steps: Baku; later on — I don‘t want to commit to any date but before shut down; and then after shutdown.
“We hope that each of them will be able to provide a few tenths of a second so that we put ourselves in a more realistic position to meet our ambition to become a top-four car towards the end of the season.”
Expanding on his new technical structure, Stella said he expected the tripartite leadership group to foster more diverse ideas to unlock performance under the regulations, suggesting the Key-led model was too set in its ways.
“What‘s important is that we bring to the table high-performance ideas,” Stella said. “That’s what we miss the most at McLaren right now.
“Making decisions most of the time is a simple natural derivation of coming to the table with elaborated and high-quality information.
“I think there‘s a misunderstanding when it comes to decision-making in Formula 1. I think people think that you are there all the time with somebody making a decision, but in reality it’s much more about creating competitive ideas, because this is what leads to natural decisions.
“This is the position in which we want to put McLaren in the future.
“We don‘t want to be at a very comfortable table with somebody in charge making all the decisions but [be] very uncompetitive in terms of the ideas we bring to the table — or with the one [person] actually being in charge kind of setting an upper limit to the level and the quality of the ideas the group generate.”
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Stella said he hoped the new model would facilitate faster decision-making that turbocharged car development.
“Formula 1 is a quick game. It’s fast,” he said. “You need to be sometimes pragmatic, utilise common sense — I don‘t think we were very good at doing that previously.
“Another thing we wanted to improve is empowerment. We have senior members in aerodynamics, senior members in the technical department — these guys need to unleash their expertise, they need to be able to make decisions.
“This makes the whole team move faster, and this is also something that we needed to address from a model point of view.”
