godlameroso wrote:I wouldn't be surprised to see them closer to the front next year. I believe after Monaco, the whole year has been nothing but a long test session. They could have fixed their suspension issue, but they didn't even try which suggests their efforts were focused elsewhere. With good reason, with wider cars this year's suspension will be useless next year. Front wing and chassis interactions do translate next year, so if you look at all the FW iterations and see relative performance stay the same, then I can see how you could draw certain conclusions. However if you take a long game approach it almost makes sense.
What makes you so sure they didn't try, rather than couldn't solve it? I can understand that there is an argument to be made for canceling all 2016 suspension-development because the suspension layout as well as the 2017 tyre characteristics will be sustainability different. However, if mistakes were made in the 2016 car's suspension design, Mclaren should have gone to the bottom of it and found out where and why it all went wrong. Although resources are always finite, suspension members, foremost the internal ones, do not require a great amount of CFD or wind tunnel time. So that wouldn't have been an issue. Putting in some effort to learn from the mistakes should have been possible without hurting 2017 development time. The learning itself could be very valuable.
If Wazari is correct in his statement in the MP4-31 thread that Mclaren instead tried to cover the issue with additional rear downforce, which in turn required more front downforce and therefore extensive front wing development, then that would have taken far more resources away from the 2017 project.
I don't see why Mclaren wouldn't have had time and resources to solve the issue, if as you say their season was a long test session after Monaco. The opposition even managed to design and build test mules with modified suspension for Pirelli.