F1 News: McLaren Pinpoints "Priority" For 2024 - "Seem To Lose Competitiveness"

Addressing the low downforce problem is a high priority for McLaren.

The McLaren Racing team has revealed that it can no longer ignore the low downforce problem on its MCL60 F1 car, a phenomenon that causes the car's aerodynamics to switch off at low downforce levels. Solving the issue is a high-priority task for the team for 2024.

Despite making considerable gains in performance in the second half of this season to emerge as one of Red Bull's serious challengers, a challenging episode during the Las Vegas Grand Prix hinted that the rival teams were better prepared in their cars' low downforce setup. 

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Considering the rise in the number of circuits on the calendar that demand a low downforce setup, McLaren cannot afford to lose points next season due to a peculiar low downforce problem in their cars. 

Team boss Andrea Stella revealed that the team's data hinted at a loss of performance in low downforce scenarios compared to rival teams. He told the media:

“We seem to lose competitiveness when we need to run the car at this drag level.

“We do see, when it comes to our own observations, the fact that the aerodynamics kind of tends to switch off.

“I'm sure that's the same for everyone, but it's more about how large this phenomenon is – and it would look like it is slightly higher for our car than for some of our competitors.” 

Increase In Low Downforce Circuits

Stella also added that the addition of tracks like Baku and Vegas to the F1 calendar meant that the team could not afford to ignore the problem. He added:

“While we continue with the development at the medium/high downforce with what we have done this year, we have definitely added quite a lot of work at low downforce and we want to go prepared to these circuits.

“Now with Baku, with Vegas, Monza, and Spa, it starts to become a decent number of races for which you do have to have an optimised car.

“In the past, it was only Spa/Monza. So now we have added a few more races, it's a priority.” 

Highlighting the technical side of the story, Stella added that the cars' aerodynamics become quite sensitive causing them to lose downforce in a non-linear way. He explained:

“When you go for a low rear wing, you go with a low front wing [for balance reasons], and very often this influences both ends because, when you reduce the load on the front wing, you reduce control of the front wheel wake.

“That affects then the behaviour of the car.

“So rather than simply losing [downforce] linearly, there's a point in which you lose more than linearly. And that's what you would like to bring back to kind of a linear loss.” 

Just ahead of the Las Vegas GP, the Woking outfit created an ultra-low downforce setup that features a single beam wing element but eventually opted out of using it because of the low grip nature of the new track. Stella concluded:

“We had a new rear wing flap.

"We had another option to run even lower drag with the beam wing, but we didn't use it because we thought that we needed to leave some downforce on the car because of the low tarmac grip. So, we just used one of the two upgrades we had.

“But certainly, we knew that this kind of upgrade doesn't change the personality of the car in terms of how it responds to the rear wing level, and we knew that this was going to be a bit of a struggle.”