bananapeel23 wrote: ↑08 Dec 2024, 22:09
Emag wrote: ↑08 Dec 2024, 21:51
The only real upgrade was the floor brought to Mexico. The rest were either circuit specific, or experiments which were run for 1 or 2 races and never trialed again. The front wing at Austria is one such example.
The suspension changes you mention were also never real suspension changes. Rather just minor fairings or slight detailing around the arms for more optimized airflow if you could even call it that.
The problem is that people judge the upgrades by what they provide in the sheets before friday. For some reason McLaren takes some extra liberties in what they decide to list as upgrades.
You could put the Abu Dhabi car side by side with the Miami car and you would struggle to spot obvious differences.
The development of this car, with the exception of the Miami package, was pretty uninspired and it was quite clear from the midpoint onwards that they were running out of ideas.
Highly likely that projected plans were scrapped after being invalidated by the tunnel, because according to their pre season goals, there were supposed to be more than just 1 “Miami-grade” packages for 2024.
"The upgrades aren't upgrades if they don't bring 5 tenths and completely transform the car." is what I'm getting from this.
They brought several packages. They developed at a decent rate, but never super quickly, since they never made a massive error they had to correct ASAP, unlike Ferrari and Red Bull.
I do agree that they probably exhausted the development options on the MCL38, or at least got so far that they were hitting diminishing returns. I have said as much. I just don't think the MCL38 "hardly improved" after Miami. It was very clearly a much better car later on in the season than it was in Miami. The Imola spec Ferrari and Red Bull were still very close to the Miami McLaren, but even after Ferrari reverted to Imola spec after the horrible Spain package, they were nowhere compared to McLaren. It took until Monza for Ferrari to be competitive again.
Thus McLaren hadn't stood still while Ferrari was struggling. If that was the case, the reversion to Imola-spec would've made the Ferrari a frontrunner well before Monza.
That wasn’t what I said regarding what should be considered a proper upgrade.
It is pretty obvious however that the magnitude of their upgrades is nowhere near what the numbers in the upgrade sheet show. Most of them were just minor things which, maybe cumulatively make up something, however individually as McLaren introduced them, would be surprising if there was any tangible laptime gain.
Especially the random small suspension fairings where you could barely tell what exactly was changed.
Your assumption that McLaren had development-induced progress based on the premise that Ferrari’s Imola spec was on par with McLaren at Imola but not later on when they switched back to it is also miss based.
You are ignoring that Imola was McLaren’s second race with the Miami package which by their own accord, brought more to the car than they expected.
Ferrari on the other hand stumbled on correlation issues so while McLaren was perfecting the setup of their car, Ferrari was busy identifying and solving problems.
The Miami spec McLaren will just naturally be faster 5 races down the line compared to when it was introduced just purely by optimising the setup.
The truth of the matter is that McLaren got somewhat lucky this year that Ferrari and RedBull both hit big problems during development, so their inability to further significantly develop the Miami platform was unpunished.
In terms of volume of high-impact upgrades, both Ferrari and RedBull actually had more throughout the season. With Ferrari in particular going through various distinctly different floor iterations.
McLaren knows this and it is why Stella came out a couple of days ago to say that they were no longer satisfied with their rate of development, and if they want to maintain this relative performance level, they need to up their game.
, I love how Andrea Stella looks diabolical. He is really enjoying it. Well deserved.
