The design choice that hurt McLaren in poor F1 Monaco GP qualifying

McLaren Formula 1 team principal Andrea Stella has revealed the combination of factors that hurt the team’s prospects in qualifying at the Monaco Grand Prix.

McLaren has been the slowest of the four big teams throughout the Monaco weekend, and a disappointing qualifying session saw Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris qualify only seventh and eighth.

The team’s prospects were not helped when Norris lost most of second practice to a technical issue, which cost valuable track time, but the reigning world champion admitted that the car just wasn’t quick enough.

“We can’t expect a lot more honestly,” Norris said. “I think it’s just clear we’re a long way off, six/seventh tenths off the pace between Oscar and myself.

“It’s just the gap to the others is too extreme, and just not a weekend where we had confidence in the car and that ability to push like we had last year.”

Stella admitted that a general lack of downforce and a design focus on being gentle on tyres combined to leave the drivers struggling for grip.

“The overall competitiveness we were expecting to be difficult at this circuit for two main technical factors,” he said.

“The first one is we know that from a chassis point of view we lack grip overall, and we have a clear objective in terms of improving the grip, and in particular the aerodynamic load.

“And the second technical factor is that the MCL40, partly by design, and partly because we want to improve this factor as well, it's very gentle on the tyres, and when you have events where you actually have to be good at introducing energy and heat in the tyres, then we struggle a bit.

“So it was not an easy task to find the right window for the tyres. We needed to work the tyres in the preparation lap in a certain manner, and still we know that especially in the initial part of a lap, we seem to be losing time compared to some other people.

“In Monaco, these two factors, overall grip and load, and the second one, the way you work the tyres, are very essential, so we anticipated not the most competitive event.”

Despite the concerns heading into the weekend Stella still hoped that the team would do better in qualifying.

“In terms of outcome, I was hoping to be able to at least have one car on the third row,” he said. “So it's a bit disappointing that we were not in condition to realise that. I think thanks to the improvements we have made from Friday to today, actually the potential was in the car to be able to qualify third [row].

“But especially in Q3 it was a bit difficult to put all this potential together, and when you have to push so much, because obviously you are not happy to be P7, P6, P5, so the drivers push very hard, and it was a bit difficult to put everything together.

“So a bit disappointed with the fourth row, but I don't think more than the third was possible.”

Stella conceded it would be wrong to assume that the tyre-saving trait that was costly in Monaco would help the car’s form at the upcoming Barcelona race.

“I think it's fair to say that this circuit definitely has exhibited the weaknesses of our car at the moment,” he cautioned. “Like I said before, in terms of general load and grip on the tyres, in terms of interaction with the tyres, the car being very gentle.

“But at the same time we know that compared to where would like to be with our car, we are a bit behind in behind the trajectory, and this is to say that it will be a false expectation if we think that we go to a circuit with different characteristics, and now McLaren fights for pole position.

“I think this is a bit too optimistic. We know that we have large opportunities in terms of improving the car aerodynamically, and the way the car interacts with the tyres, and it's just for us to go and materialise these opportunities, we're not really hoping for a circuit characteristic, we need to focus on ourselves and improve the car.”

McLaren drop new front wing after latest tests

McLaren also used the weekend to conduct further testing with the new front wing that was tried briefly and shelved in Canada. Although both drivers sampled it again in Monaco, it was not kept on the car for qualifying.

Asked by Crash.net if going back and forth on the aero package had compromised preparations in any way Stella denied that was the case.

"Here we ran the new front wing in a slightly modified configuration,” he said. “Which is part of learning on the response of this new component, based on which there's a few more developments coming for the next races.

“So it was important to test it after Canada. In reality, the behaviour of the front wing, which is closer to the expectation, but requires a bit more work, so we will definitely see once more this front wing in the coming events.

“It was not very far from the baseline front wing, so it wasn't much intrusive in the overall preparation from a driving point of view, it was important that it was tested today, for instance, in FP3 by both cars – because yesterday it was on Lando's car, it was expected to happen the test on Lando's car, but the car broke.

“So we needed to repeat the test, because we wanted to have this this data, but actually today in qualifying we run still the baseline front, which not the new one.”

Intriguingly Stella added that the new wing was not in itself expected to bring a significant improvement in lap time, but was rather the starting point for a new concept.

“Based on this front wing there will be several developments, and in itself this front wing wasn't expected to be like a large step from a number point of view,” he explained.

“It was more the beginning of a new concept, so we wanted to spend enough time, and definitely after Canada, there were a couple of things that we needed to rectify, like we say.

“But here we are very close to expectation, so I think we are happy with the data we have seen, and from this point onwards, we will start introducing the developments that are based on this new front wing.”