By When Are McLaren Likely To Fix Their Issues?

It appears as though McLaren’s 2024 F1 challenger, the MCL 38, has carried over the weaknesses associated with its predecessor as seen in the last season. It might not be a rampantly quick car, but is somewhere consistent enough to clock a top five finish in a Grand Prix.

Not exceedingly quick on the straights, there’s still a lot of work to be done on the MCL 38 if McLaren are to assert their presence on the current grid.

Their current closest rival as far as the Constructor’s championship is concerned remains Mercedes. And unless urgent upgrades are introduced to further strengthen the MCL 38’s performance, it is highly unlikely that McLaren would be able to match the notable speed of some of the other Constructors, most notably- Ferrari.

But with a recent podium as seen at Australia where Lando Norris clocked a third, the overall mood in the team camp is anything but damp.

Ahead of the Japanese Grand Prix of 2024, to be held at Suzuka, team principal Andrea Stella opened up on a host of issues plaguing his team’s car. He would highlight some particular weaknesses, areas for improvement and what could be expected in the months ahead.

Having said that, the following is what McLaren team principal Andrea Stella remarked when asked about the recent rate of development of the car and what could be expected ahead:

“We are extremely happy with the rate of development over the last 12 months, but there’s, I would say, another 12 months’ development that we need to go through to actually offer a car that is strong in DRS and is strong in the long corners.”

That said, Stella also elaborated on the point with regard to the expected upgrades and how might they impact the car performance:

“Around race six or seven we should have a decent round of upgrades, and hopefully there will be potentially a couple of them throughout the season.”

But critical to any team’s results on track is the level of performance, isn’t it? So by when can that aspect be fixed? Andra Stella had more to add on the aforementioned:

“It will take the whole season to actually add enough performance and say we don’t see these weaknesses anymore because these areas have improved.”

But having said the above, the famous team principal didn’t, in any way, allude to the fact that there are any existing issues back at the McLaren factory. He would further highlight about the actual issues with the car in elaborating the following:

“There’s nothing going wrong, the car is not developed enough and these aspects expose themselves, like you become weak in long corners or you don’t have enough speed in DRS. But this is effectively a consequence of the development. If you ask me how is the car behaving, I say very well, like it goes as expected. It does exactly what we expect from the wind tunnel. It does what we expect from the computer development.”