For the 20th race in a row the Australian Grand Prix will welcome a home hero onto the grid, with Oscar Piastri set to fly the flag at Albert Park.
Since Mark Webber’s Minardi debut in 2002, Australia has enjoyed the privilege of cheering on a local driver. Webber and Daniel Ricciardo’s careers briefly coincided around a decade later, and this year Ricciardo has passed the baton onto Piastri.
But one thing fans Down Under have never seen is an Australian on the podium — not a podium that survived the stewards room, anyway — and unfortunately that equally long streak also looks set to continue.
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McLaren’s start to 2023 has been painful at best, and after two lacklustre races the team sits last in the constructors championship. Notwithstanding reliability problems and car damage, the MCL60 hasn’t even looked like a likely shout at a points-paying finish.
But there are reasons to think its slump is only temporary and that Piastri’s first home grand prix might also be his first big chance to make a big impression.
WHY THERE’S STILL HOPE DESPITE THE FUNK
In generating some hope for this year, it’s instructive to look back to last season, when McLaren had a similarly dispiriting start to its campaign.
Then, just as now, the team turned up to pre-season testing dramatically underdone. Then, as now, it had a shocker of a first race, with neither car showing any great competitiveness.
In 2022 it was down to a miscalculation with brake cooling that forced Daniel Ricciardo and Norris into significant pace management just to make it to the finish. This year electronic gremlins cruelled Piastri’s race and a pneumatic leak killed Norris’s night.
But that first race was as bad as it got in an otherwise reasonable year. Though the team still had to grapple for the entire season with a difficult-to-handle car, the pace picked up considerably as soon as at the next race.
In Saudi Arabia both cars made Q2 in 11th and 12th, just missing out on a spot in the pole shootout. Norris scored points in seventh, and Ricciardo was on track to do the same before an engine failure ended his race early.
Things improved again in Australia, where the new faster, more flowing circuit configuration played to the car’s strengths. Norris and Ricciardo qualified fourth and seventh respectively and finished comfortably ahead of the midfield in fifth and sixth.
In fact the team enjoyed only one better Sunday the entire year — in Singapore, where Norris and Ricciardo capitalised on wacky conditions to finish fourth and fifth.
Waters talks tricky Melbourne SuperSpint | 04:22
Not to say it was a flash in the pan — Melbourne was the start of a five-race stretch over which McLaren had a slender qualifying pace advantage over Alpine. In fact McLaren was marginally faster for the entire season if the first two races are discounted.
Could the same come to pass this year?
Already in Saudi Arabia the signs were more positive than they were in Bahrain, though first-lap damage to both cars simultaneously prevented Piastri and Norris from fighting up the field and discovering just how much performance was in their car to unlock.
But there are significant differences too.
One of the reasons the team started on the back foot last season was that it couldn’t do any long running during pre-season testing. The first two races were essentially live tests, and you could say that it was in Australia, combined with some minor upgrades, that the car really started its season.
The same isn’t true this year, when the MCL60 is simply underdeveloped relative to its rivals — more on that below.
And the team has already signalled that the current car is being abandoned after the Australian Grand Prix in favour of a different aerodynamic model. Unlike last year, that means it won’t be receiving any major updates to haul it forwards this weekend.
And last year the field was less competitive, with only two obvious frontrunners and Mercedes sometimes vulnerable, leaving at least four points-paying places up for grabs. This year by rights the top eight positions are locked out, and Alpine appears to have a strong claim to ninth and 10th. The scope to score is much smaller.
None of that should detract from the fact that McLaren clearly isn’t as bad as the first two races looked, and there are reasons to hope that the 2023 recovery will come.
But it does mean expectations should be tempered for this weekend, when points are undeniably unlikely.
Lando claims he LET Oscar pass… | 01:01
WHAT’S GONE WRONG FOR McLAREN?
Putting aside the broader question of McLaren’s stalled progress in recent years, this season in particular it appears to have been caught out by a seemingly innocuous tweak to the regulations relating to the car’s floor.
This season the FIA has raised the height of the floor edges by 15 millimetres. In the F1 world of supersensitive aerodynamics, that was a killer blow to McLaren’s car concept.
The team was already playing catch-up last year under the first season of the new regulations when the change was ratified. It was confident that it had found an aero philosophy that gave it decent development potential for this year.
Then it realised that the car it was pinning its hopes on was incompatible with that seemingly small extra 15 millimetres of ground clearance.
Reportedly it wasn’t until September last year that it realised it had a problem — long after the development process of the 2023 car had started.
“When we took the 15 millimetre floor step, it actually gave us a much bigger loss than anticipated,” former technical boss James Key said, per The Race.
“When we took that step it was a really big knock for us. Then trying to recover with what we knew at the time, and this was probably September time, we’re thinking, ‘This is not working, actually we’ve actually got to change direction entirely with these geometries’.”
Changing development philosophy takes time the team simply didn’t have. So in February it launched the car it had in September, when it decided to change tack. It’s ‘real’ launch car according to its new thinking is due to arrive at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in April.
Norris ordered to make way for Piastri! | 00:32
A TEAM IN NEED OF REVITALISATION
Whether the promise of the big April upgrade should be enough to suspend your disbelief is debatable, however.
While it’s fair enough to acknowledge that its early performances aren’t representative of what the team’s capable of achieving, it’s equally fair to say that the only reason it’s fielding such an undercooked car is because the design team failed to recognise the significance of the impending rule chance.
That same design team is developing the new car due at the end of next month. One might ask why it should be expected to be any more than a midfield-tier car at best considering the team’s track record.
As explored here earlier this month, McLaren’s 2018–21 recovery wave was at least a little exaggerated by circumstances that helped it to higher finishes in the constructors championship that might otherwise have been available.
CEO Zak Brown and new team principal Andrea Stella responded by sacking technical director James Key last week. While that didn’t stem directly from the poor first two races, those results were inextricably linked with the clumsy management of the development of this year’s car under Key’s technical leadership.
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It might seem a touch cruel to axe the man McLaren brought on board only four years ago, especially because Key was one of the major proponents behind the team’s investment in a new wind tunnel and simulator, which come online in a few months.
But alternatively you could read it as a sign that the team understands infrastructure isn’t everything — after all, Aston Martin’s massive jump up the order this season has come despite it operating out of headquarters built for Jordan’s first season in 1991.
By cutting Key, McLaren has acknowledged its running out of excuses for its underperformance. When its new tools come online, there’ll be nowhere for it to hide.
In that sense the new structure should be a heartening for fans who might’ve been left wondering about their team’s ultimate potential.
It should be heartening for Oscar Piastri fans too. While the start of the season hasn’t met expectations and his first home race is unlikely to be significantly much better, McLaren has the capacity to make decent inroads as the year progresses.
And with a new technical team and infrastructure set to come online soon, the medium-term future is at least hopeful for the team and its Australian rising star.
