“Ambitious” car changes made McLaren “nervous” about sim data

McLaren has revealed that it took an “aggressive” and “ambitious” approach with designing its 2025 Formula 1 car, a strategy that left it “nervous” before the start of the year.

McLaren ended the 2024 F1 season with the fastest car of any team, as it quickly overhauled early-season pacesetter Red Bull in the latter part of the year to win its first constructors’ title in 25 years.

However, instead of evolving the same concept for the final year of the regulation cycle, which would have been the logical choice, McLaren focused heavily on innovation with the design of the MCL39.

The Woking-based squad had taken a similar approach in 2013, the final year of the V8 era, only for the strategy to backfire and the team to slump to fifth in the championship with no podiums.

McLaren admit nerves before dominant period

This time, however, the bold decision to pursue revolution over evolution has paid off, enabling McLaren to open up a significant advantage over its rivals.

At the start of the summer break, McLaren has scored double the points of its nearest rival Ferrari, while Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris are also comfortably clear of the rest in the drivers’ championship.

Team principal Andrea Stella explained that such was the extent of the overhaul that it didn’t expect the changes to deliver going into the new season.

“I've been surprised by this level of competitiveness,” he said. “When last year we discussed how much effort we wanted to put in improving the 2024 car, we definitely wanted to be very ambitious.

“We wanted to try and clear the ‘going into race weekends and you never know who's going to win’ situation we had last year, and we thought we needed to do a little bit more than the normal development.

“So how do we do that? We embraced a very aggressive approach to innovation. The MCL39 is a very innovative car. From an engineering point of view, we've been nervous as to some solutions, whether we were actually in the condition to deliver them. 

“But then when we looked at the lap times and the numbers in simulations, actually, we thought that wouldn't be enough. At the start of the season, effectively it wasn’t enough.”

Stella went on to explain that McLaren introduced a number of small updates to the car going into the season, which brought a considerable improvement in lap time.

“So, there's a factor that has happened during this season, which is the car has actually been upgraded,” he continued.

“I think it was more noticeable in the past because we were coming with one-off upgrades, and they were in themselves very noticeable. 

“But actually, even if we consider the last three, four races, there's been quite a lot of new parts that have been added. If we add all these in a single incidence, then we would say, ‘Oh, McLaren has a big upgrade.’ 

“So, I think this has helped a lot in creating this trend and finding that in the last three races, we were definitely very competitive."