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 focussed 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.”
Stella 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.”
