After firing James Key, ‘father’ of the MCL60, and reorganizing his technical staff, the papaya team has managed to reverse one of its worst starts to the season
The car has improved 9 tenths in qualifying and Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri have scored 70 of the team’s 87 points this year in the last three races
The recovery that McLaren has starred in in recent weeks is the most spectacular of those that have been seen this year in Formula 1, even superior to Aston Martin’s brilliant start to the course. The drop in performance of the AMR23 has been directly proportional to the performance improvement of the MCL60 in the last three races.
After the fiasco in Bahrain and Arabia, where Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri hit bottom and the papaya team went on to occupy the last place in the constructors’ classification, McLaren chose to remove the technical director from his position since 2019 James Keyundertaking a profound reorganization in which Peter Prodromou, who was Adrian Newey’s right-hand man at Red Bull, became chief aerodynamicist and Neil Houldeyresponsible for engineering and car design, all under the supervision of the main teamI Andrea Stella and the CEO of the team Zak Brown.
In three months McLaren has managed to straighten the course thanks to an ambitious development plan. Lando Norris, 17th in Spain and 13th in Canada, touched the podium in Austria (4th) and after chaining two second places in Silverstone and Hungary seems to have taken over from Fernando Alonso as the driver who worries Red Bull the most. In front of his fans, in Great Britain, he was less than 4 “in Verstappen’s race, although this Sunday at the Hungaroring the Dutchman’s advantage was once again ‘lethal’, crossing the finish line with 33 seconds compared to Lando.
In the first six tests of the season, the MCL60 presented an average qualifying time 1,260 seconds per lap slower than the ideal pole time. On the other hand, in the following four, not counting Canada, McLaren has driven at an average of 0.274 seconds per lap of the pole on Saturdays. This represents an improvement of 0.986 seconds, as analyzed by the specialized portal motor.es.
It has also exponentially improved its degradation problems, although this last aspect will have to do with the new casings, more rigid, introduced by Pirelli since the British GP. Curiously, Fernando Alonso attributes part of the ‘fault’ to them in the downturn of Aston Martin, which at the beginning of the season got a bonus at the end of the races for taking better care of the tires than its direct rivals.
McLaren has gone from scoring only 17 points in the first six races to 70 in the next five. On the other hand, Aston Martin posted 120 points from Bahrain to Monaco and in the last five races it has reduced its balance by almost half (64 points), although after eleven grand prix it remains third in the Constructors’ World Championship with 184 points, 39 behind the second, Mercedes and still far behind the Woking team, fifth in the table, 97 points behind the team. alonso.