What’s going on with McLaren’s new F1 front wing it abandoned in Canada?

McLaren is set to carry out a further test of the new front wing design it ultimately rejected in Canada at this weekend’s Monaco Grand Prix.

The reigning world champion squad brought a revised front wing to the Canadian Grand Prix as part of a second bulk of developments following on from its major upgrade package that debuted at the previous round in Miami.

Lando Norris ran the new front wing design throughout Friday’s sole practice session, while team-mate Oscar Piastri started the session with the old-spec front wing, before trying out the new version later on.

McLaren ultimately decided to remove the new front wing from its MCL40 ahead of sprint qualifying.

Technical director for engineering Neil Houldey said “the front wing wasn’t quite delivering what we expected and we ultimately took the call to run the previous specification front wing, which gave the drivers more confidence and allowed them to unlock more performance”.

Despite ultimately discarding the updated front wing, McLaren is not giving up on it.

Speaking after Sunday’s race in Montreal, reigning world champion Norris suggested the front wing would return to McLaren’s car in Monaco.

“We need to just make sure it works properly next time,” he said. “It's not a guarantee we're going to run it in Monaco, but we'll do tests to see if we can make it work better.”

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella confirmed the wing would indeed be tested in Monaco, though the team may decide not to race it.

“We knew that this front wing had some element of deviation from an aerodynamic point of view,” Stella explained. “So we’ve tested the wing. We want to repeat some testing and gain some further information.

“And also for this kind of circuit, the wing would have been better, but it wouldn't have been a game changer. So before we adopted [it] in a sprint event, we wanted to be just more reassured that we understand the full extent of the changes we’re making on the car.

“While we've been pretty much always successful in the past, not necessarily the upgrades that we have taken to a certain event, we have introduced them for that event. Sometimes they were just exploratory and just to learn the correlation with our development tools.

“So we will definitely see this wing again in Monaco.”