Tag Archives: McLaren

Alonso says the Austin updates won’t for make a dramatic change in form

Fernando Alonso has downplayed the significance of Aston Martin’s update package for the Formula 1 US GP and suggested that new parts won’t be a “game changer” for any team.

The Spaniard says that at this stage of the season it will be hard for any teams to find significant performance with their latest upgrades.

Aston’s Austin package includes a revised floor, and is seen as in part as a preview of the direction that the team is taking for 2025.

“I don’t think expectations can be too high,” he said. “We have some new parts, but I don’t think that it will change the full picture.

“I think this part of the championship, the upgrades are quite small. I think all of them are just also in line to what the 2025 car is looking at the tunnel. So it’s more a half-test, half-performance, introduction.

“And for us, it’s important as keeping the good understanding of the car that I think we started to have after Budapest, and that’s probably the main target for this weekend, try to have a good correlation, and see that all the new parts are doing what we expect from them.

“In terms of performance and positions in qualifying of the race, I don’t think that is going to be a game changer for anybody.”

Asked by this writer how vital it would be to hit the ground running he said: “It’s going to be important.

“Sprint weekends are obviously a little bit more challenging, because you cannot really optimise things, and especially when you bring new parts to the car or something, then you have only that that shot in FP1, and then you commit at least for half of the weekend this year.

“But yeah, starting with the right feeling and confidence in the car will be important. That’s why today’s preparation and meetings are a bit more delicate than any other weekend, trying to get it everything right.”

He added: “After Budapest, we understood some of the directions that we took in the past, and why it was not correlated properly on track, and that package was a good sign on what we wanted to achieve, and this is just a continuation of that.

“So I think we are reasonably optimistic that correlation will be good, and tomorrow we will see what we want to see.

“But in terms of performance, as I said, when you are at this part of the championship, all the gains are very marginal. All the other teams, they are bringing as well.

“So even if you bring one tenth, half a tenth, the other ones, they are bringing half a tenth, one tenth, and you keep in the same position. So I think it’s going to be the case of this weekend.”

He agreed that there is an opportunity for Aston to benefit by getting it right in FP1 while other teams struggle.

“For sure, I think more than the specifics of the upgrades, I think it’s going to be more important to get it right straight away. Because if you bring a performance package of one-tenth and you get it wrong, maybe you lose two compared the previous race.

“And if you bring half a tenth and you exploit everything of that half a tenth, maybe it becomes one-tenth when you put it on track.

“So the difference can be quite big if you get it right or wrong. And we have only one session. So it’s one of those FP1s that you want everything clean.

“Last year, remember, we went out of Q1 because we had a very messy FP1, brake problems. We had fire on the brakes. Lance did I think one installation lap in the whole FP1, I did eight laps, and that compromised the whole weekend. So this is a big focus into this year’s free practice.”

Ferrari missed an opportunity in Singapore

Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur admits that his team must do a “better job” and be consistent through a whole race weekend in the wake of a frustrating Singapore GP.

The red cars were fast on Friday, but the team lost its way on Saturday, with a Q3 mistake for Charles Leclerc and a crash for Carlos Sainz – both blamed on cold tyres – leaving them starting only ninth and 10th on the grid.

They recovered to fifth and seventh in the race, but that was rather less than what the SF-24 would have been capable of from better starting positions.

“It’s always good to finish the weekend on a positive tone, and honestly today, it was a very good race,” said Vasseur.

“It’s true that on the other hand you increase a little bit the frustration after a poor Saturday, when you have this kind of race.

“But I prefer to have a frustration on Sunday evening, after Saturday, with a good race, than a poor race. And you say, ‘Okay it was like this.’ I think it’s good to finish and to attack the three or four weeks break with a positive tone.”

Vasseur admitted that the team had got it wrong in qualifying and paid the price on Sunday.

“On Friday we were in better shape, and it means that we missed something during the weekend, it’s clear,” he said. “When you start in Singapore ninth and 10th, you know that we made something wrong on Saturday.

“But it’s not the Sunday that we have to blame something or someone. It’s more to do a better job on Saturday.

“I don’t want to blame something or someone, that it’s part of the game, and we have to be focused honestly to do a more consistent weekend.

“I think it’s true for everybody. When you are in this pack today, as soon as you will do a small mistake, it doesn’t matter if it’s quali or race, or even free practice now, it’s quite difficult to recover.”

Vasseur provide some insight into the tyre temperature issues in Q3, and which left Leclerc especially frustrated.

“I think the story had nothing to do with the blankets, the story is that when we exit from the pit that we were all playing a kind of a game, because nobody wanted to be first,” he noted.

“Nobody wanted to be last. We did a fake to release the car from the pit lane, and everybody was trying to copy the others.

“And then we stopped a little bit at the pit exit. And we recovered a large part of this, but it’s true that we arrived at Turn 2 slightly lower on tyre temp, but marginally.

“And again, we have one lap, you are chasing the last kph in Turn 1, because at the end of the day, when you are one hundredth behind the guy in front of you, that you have some regrets if you didn’t push.

“It is like it is. We have to take this, I discussed with Charles, and it’s part of the game.”

Vasseur insisted that both drivers showed good pace in the latter part of the race on the hard tyres.

“I’m not focused on the others,” he said. “But the last 25 laps, I think we did the same race time as Lando. Perhaps he was doing some push, cool, push to recharge the battery and to try the fastest lap, I didn’t follow.

“But at least we were into the pace, and its encouraging. But the target was not to match to Lando today, it was to come back to score points. And on this, I think we had a good recovery.”

He added: “The strict result of the weekend, is not the one expected, but the result of the Sunday is a good one. It’s a good race. We had a strong pace. Good start for Charles, Carlos was a little bit on the dirty side and a bit blocked, but then a good strategy, a good pit stop, with tyre management in the line of the last couple of events.

“And I think we can be pleased with this. Now we have a couple of weeks to prepare for  the last six races, and to be ready power for Austin.”

Stella says that McLaren can’t risk holding back on updates

McLaren Formula 1 boss Andrea Stella says that his team can’t back off on its development plans for the MCL38 despite its current advantage.

The team has made a point of not bringing many updates recently, and has instead focus on optimising what it has.

The car has been the pacesetter at most venues, with Lando Norris scoring a dominant win in Singapore last weekend.

More updates are coming for Austin and beyond, but the team faces the challenge of possible disrupting its currently successful package while it tries to optimise the car for the new parts.

With that in mind plus the need to focus on 2025 it’s tempting for the team to rein in its development plans, but Stella says it would be wrong to do that.

“We do have some stuff in the pipeline,” he said. “And obviously, when you have this kind of performance on track, you always may approach things from a cautious point of view in terms of development.

“At the same time, we need to trust the process. We need to trust the way we’ve been working so far. I’ve said already that we have taken our time to make sure that once we deliver [parts] trackside, we have done the due diligence. So I don’t think this will change our plans.

In F1, I’m not sure you can back off too much, because backing off means that the others may catch. And we don’t know what the plans of the others are.”

Stela cited Red Bull’s return to form in Singapore as an example of how quickly things can change.

“In Red Bull we see that in a track in which they thought they would have not been very competitive, ultimately, they were potentially second best,” he said.

“I think we haven’t seen Ferrari today very well, but even Ferrari, FP1/FP2 they seem to be as fast as us. And the final stint of Leclerc was very competitive. So I think the race may give us a little bit of maybe flattering. I think you say like this.

“The situation from a competitiveness point of view, I would say we need to keep being aggressive in terms of development.”

Stella said that the advantage in Singapore was down to the car working especially well at high downforce levels rather than the MCL38 getting inherently better relative to rivals.

“I think if I look at previous races, at this high level of downforce, we seem to be very competitive,” he said. “So I think it might have to do more with the level of downforce than with the fact that we may be chipping away at getting more and more out of the car.

“I think the car has been strong in this configuration.

“I always make the examples of Hungary and Zandvoort. Even Hungary was a relatively dominant victory in itself, and like Zandvoort and like this one. So I think at the moment is more that the car in this configuration has the better aerodynamic efficiency across the grid, while at low drag, I think the efficiency of Ferrari and Red bull is much more comparable to our car.

“We know certainly that we have invested much more at this level of downforce, than what we have done at lower downforce, even though I’ve said already after races like Spa and Monza, we have definitely made a step forward in terms of retaining downforce when we reduce the level of drag.”

Stella said that Norris’s advantage over Verstappen shrank in the late stages of the Singapore race because of concerns about backmarkers.

“In fairness, in the second part of the second stint, our attention was drawn on the fact that as soon as you got behind the back markers, the car started to feel tricky. So if it was all about like, no issues, no mistakes, no lockup.

“We had seen already in practice that as soon as you are behind a slow car, things look like there’s something wrong with the car. It’s just the effect of the dirty. So the focus was entirely on bringing the car home.

“We suggested to Lando to have an attempt at the fastest lap, which we achieved. But after that, we didn’t want to talk about fastest lap anymore.”

Red Bull boss Christian Horner says that the Singapore GP indicated signs of “real progress” with the tricky RB20 – despite Max Verstappen finishing 20 seconds behind dominant race winner Lando Norris.

Red Bull had a floor revision in Baku that worked well on Sergio Perez’s car, but was less obvious on Verstappen’s due to a set-up mistake prior to qualifying.

Verstappen was happier with the car in Singapore, starting second and beating everyone else bar Norris in the race itself.

Horner noted that the Dutchman was particularly quick on the harder tyre in the second part of the race.

“First of all, you have to congratulate Lando and McLaren,” he said. “They had a very strong car this weekend, and particularly on the first stint, they were very quick. I think on the hard tyre, we looked in better shape.

“But of course, the gap is way too big by then, at a track where anyway it’s very hard to overtake.

“So I think if you roll back the clock to Friday, on Friday night I think if you’d have said we would qualify on the front row and take second place, a significant amount ahead of the rest of the field, I think we would have certainly taken that.

“But obviously, the gap to Lando was significant in the first part of the race, and we’ve now got the best part of a month to work hard and try and bring some performance to the car in Austin.”

He added: “I think Lando was a step ahead, particularly on the medium tyre. On the hard it didn’t show as much, but on the medium tyre, he was he was very, very quick today.

“But the rest of the field, I didn’t see a car that was quicker than Max. I thought Piastri had good duration to his stint on that medium tyre, but then on a hard tyre, it was an 18-second gap, and it seemed to be static for a long period.”

Horner admitted that Red Bull knew it was beaten during Norris’s first stint, which saw McLaren telling its driver to increase an already impressive gap.

“With the pace he had in hand on that tyre at that point we’ve conceded the race on pace,” he said. “He touched the wall for the first time, then he touched it for the second time. But obviously they’ve got it got away with it.

“I actually think Max drove a very strong race today, and that was what we had. Which when you consider where we were a couple of weeks ago, I think we have made some real progress. And obviously we’ve got a lot of work to do before Austin.”

Horner said the team had made a good recovery for qualifying in Baku after going the wrong way on setup in Friday practice.

“I think we wanted to avoid a repeat of last year,” he said. “And I think perhaps we overcompensated.

“But I think the way the team reacted, the effort that went into that reaction, we were able to give Max a much better car [on Saturday]. And obviously in the race we couldn’t compete with Lando today, but we had the rest of the field covered.”

Regarding Perez’s drive to 10^th place he said: “Checo had a good first lap. He qualified out of position, and then he just really struggled to overtake.

“He was struggling a little for traction in the areas where you want the traction, out of Turn 3, and onto the back straight. But that was what he could manage today.”

An already strong McLaren has had another boost…

Red Bull Racing has suffered another key loss as its head of strategy Will Courtenay is joining McLaren in the role of sporting director.

That job largely involves dealing with the FIA on regulations and so on, and is currently being done at the Woking ream by racing director Randeep Singh, to whom Courtenay will now report.

Red Bull is already losing its own current sporting director Jonathan Wheatley, who joins Sauber/Audi in 2025.

McLaren says that Courtenay’s “role will help grow the team’s sporting operations as the team continues its pursuit of success in the FIA Formula 1 World Championship.”

Cambridge University engineering graduate Courtenay joined Red Bull in 2003 as a systems engineer, when the team was still known as Jaguar.

Later he was a strategy engineer and a senior analyst, before becoming head of strategy in 2010, a role he’s held ever since.

“We are delighted to welcome Will to McLaren,” said Andrea Stella. “His experience, professionalism and passion for motorsport make him the ideal candidate to lead our F1 sporting function.

“We are now entering a key phase in our journey as a team, and we are confident that he will be a great addition to our strong leadership team as we strive to continue challenging for wins and championships.”

No starting date has been given for Courtenay.

Stella says other teams focussing on the McLaren rear wing is a positive

McLaren Formula 1 team boss Andrea Stella says that the MCL38’s rear wing is a “red herring” and that rivals being distracted by it is “good news” for the Woking team.

McLaren’s flexing low-downforce rear wing became a major focus in the wake of the Baku race after video footage emerged.

The team agreed with the FIA to make what it calls minor adjustments before it is used again in Las Vegas, another high-speed track.

Stella sees the fuss around the wing a positive because it distracts other teams as they focus on one facet of the pace-setting McLaren.

“The legality of the wing is incontrovertible and it’s a fact,” said Stella. “Personally, as team principal of McLaren, I find that so much attention in our rear wing is just good news, because it means that opponents are not focussing on themselves, and F1 is such a marginal game, it’s so complicated.

“I keep repeating to my team, focus on yourself. So for me, when I see that there’s so much attention from other teams, it means that they will be doing work, they will be doing analysis, they will be talking to the FIA and there’s limited time and limited energy. They’re using this time and energy to chase something that I think is a red herring.

“So for me, as McLaren, that’s just good news. We try to stay focused on ourselves, we want to come with technical solutions that may be challenging, but totally sound from a legality point of view.

“If others want to get destructive, keep doing that. Because for us, it’s just good news.”

On the subject why the team agreed with the FIA to make changes he made it clear that they won’t have a major impact on performance.

“Well, we want to proactively have conversation with the FIA, because it looks like this story is becoming big for us,” he said. “Making changes is pretty much transparent, so we may as well do it.

“It won’t be a big consequence from a performance point of view. This also gave us the opportunity to remind the FIA that, we also do some due diligence in terms of studying other people.

“We don’t want to spend so much energy and time with journalists and trying to create big stories.

“We just told the FIA what we think is happening, and we trust, and we are confident that they will talk to the other teams, and make sure. that they fix their own issues, which may be less visible, but definitely they do exist.”

Asked by this write to elaborate on the team’s own interest in rivals Stella insisted that it the team’s approach was more low-key than that of others.

“I think when I say about focussing on yourself, this is not that you don’t look at the competitors,” he said.

“This is how big a story it is that you create around competitors. And I don’t want my people at McLaren to go racing and think, ‘Oh, of course they won, because they have this solution.’

“It’s just such a distraction from a mindset point of view. When you go racing, you think and you focus on yourself.

“This doesn’t mean that you don’t look at the competitors, and you don’t study how the formation happens on competitors, and you don’t go to the FIA and say, have you looked at that? That’s technical due diligence, that’s tough competition that we do have at McLaren.

“Having done that, now we focus on ourselves. And everyone go racing, thinking about maximising what we have.

“Not creating and pumping these kind of stories which become such a distraction for your own team, because they will be thinking, ‘Oh, McLaren, they are fast because they have that.’

“We are in Singapore. Personally, I haven’t seen a lot of a slot gap opening. Have you? We are today a pole position. That’s where I want people to focus.

“In this sense, I think this is a distraction, and it’s good news, not in the sense that we don’t look and study competitors, because this is part of total competition in F1.”