McLaren does still have more upgrades in the pipeline for after Formula 1’s summer break despite its full focus in the windtunnel being on the 2022 car.
Upgrades to the bargeboard, which The Race’s Gary Anderson explained on Thursday, and the detail at the rear of the floor were successfully trialled in Friday practice for the Hungarian Grand Prix, the latest in a series of tweaks made by McLaren during the first 11 events of the season.
But McLaren’s executive director of racing Andrea Stella explained that not only does the team still have some parts that have been through aero testing already. It also has the capacity to make modifications without using the windtunnel.
“They will not be the last upgrades of the season simply because when you release upgrades then it takes some time to produce them and land trackside, so there will be a few more,” said Stella.
“And also in Formula 1 you always keep acquiring some information once you test the parts trackside, because you never get a perfect correlation with the development tools.
“So once you test some upgrades trackside, you normally get information for further fine tuning which doesn’t necessarily require to go past the windtunnel.
“You simply can adapt based on some runs in CFD, for example, associated with what you learned by testing parts trackside.
“So this upgrade in Hungary is not the last one, there will be some more tweaks that will be tested in future races. Nothing major, but some parts will come.”
Both Lando Norris and Daniel Ricciardo reported struggling during Friday practice. Norris was the best-placed of the duo with ninth in both sessions, lapping 1.094s off in FP1 and 1.301s down in FP2.
Despite the need to, as Ricciardo put it, make another step on Saturday, team principal Andreas Seidl said that the upgrades were performing as expected.
“We had several things to test thanks to a big push from the factory delivering upgrades to the track here,” said Seidl.
“We went through our test programme as planned. We used the time between the two session to digest the data and confirm that all the upgrades were working.
“So we aligned both cars then for free practice two kept the updates on for both cars, which is good.”
