McLaren insists it’s not the Formula 1 team at the centre of the FIA’s sudden additional clampdown on flexible rear wings and says it won’t need to make any changes to its 2025 car.
Following rear wing analysis in Melbourne the FIA has immediately moved to tighten up the tests for flexing rear wings, cutting the tolerance of slot gap movement from 2mm to 0.75mm for the Chinese Grand Prix and 0.5mm thereafter.
That rule change was initially seen as a win for Red Bull given the team has pushed the FIA hard to prevent the return of the ‘mini-DRS’ tricks that were so effective at times for chief rival McLaren last year.
McLaren’s been at the centre of suspicions from Red Bull, which believes McLaren has been exploiting those ‘mini-DRS’ tricks once again this year - technical director Pierre Wache told The Race in Bahrain testing that he suspected both McLaren and Ferrari were doing so.
But McLaren claims it hasn’t had to change its rear wing for Shanghai this weekend as its Melbourne-spec car would have passed the more stringent tests anyway. It is adamant it has used the same wing throughout all 2025 so far including testing and isn’t changing it now.
In fact Lando Norris, whose McLaren MCL39 was the only car subjected to four specific rear wing load deflection tests post-race in Australia after winning, went a step further and said it was evidence McLaren hadn’t been pushing that area enough.
"Nope, we don't have to change anything,” Norris said when asked about the rule change on Thursday in China.
“Ours is fine. In fact ours is probably too good and we probably are not pushing the limits enough honestly.
“If this technical directive was applied for last weekend we'd also be fine so it's not directed at us it seems.
“It's directed at other teams, which probably means we need to push it even more."
Mercedes driver George Russell said after the Australian GP that McLaren was so far ahead in performance terms it could stop developing its 2025 car now to focus on next year's rule changes and still win this year's titles.
When Norris's argument that McLaren wouldn't have to change its wing in light of the new technical directive was put to him, Russell suggested the FIA's move wouldn't make much difference to any teams.
"If the TD was there in Melbourne they definitely would have won the race because they’re just so far ahead," Russell said of McLaren.
"It’s not going to change anything from our side. I don’t know who the TD was introduced for but I’m pretty confident it wasn’t us or Red Bull.
"But I’m also confident for the teams it’s going to hurt it’s not going to hurt them enough that it will have any sort of impact on the result."
The FIA clearly felt some teams could be exploiting the rules given the increased monitoring it put in place for the Australian GP, monitoring the rear wings with extra onboard high-definition cameras and additional load tests on the cars in the garages.
The FIA clearly wasn’t comfortable with what it found across those extra tests and monitoring - even though it conceded all cars were found to be legal under the (former) regulations - otherwise it wouldn’t have cut the slot gap movement tolerance by 75%.
As well as Norris’s car’s wings being checked after the race, Max Verstappen’s Red Bull, George Russell’s Mercedes and Carlos Sainz’s Williams all had their aerodynamic and bodywork tested - including front and rear wing regulation compliance.
