F1 News: McLaren Reveals Final Upgrade Of 2023 Season

The last round of upgrades will pave way for the testing of the 2024 F1 car in their new wind tunnel.

McLaren is still hoping to extract that last bit of performance from the MCL60. According to Team Principal Andrea Stella, low-drag solutions for high-speed tracks like Las Vegas and Monza would be based on the team's podium finishes in Britain and Hungary. 

The upgrades include changes to the bodywork and the floor, which the team hopes to include post the summer break. Stella revealed:

 “We are working on an evolution of these concepts for post shutdown. There is another kind of round [of changes to] the bodywork and floor.

"We still have to sign this off, and we have a few more days of work, but if we are successful, then we will definitely attempt to bring it in one of the events soon after the shutdown.”

The recent upgrades their car received saw McLaren take a big step forward in terms of performance, which was greater than their expectations. However, with the expected last round of upgrades, Stella cautions that they may not display a significant improvement as the previous round of upgrades. 

Asking his team not to expect too much from the "conceptual evolution," given the factor of uncertainty with aerodynamics, he revealed:

“I think we kind of understand what happened with this one, but what we are working on is not only simple millimetres, it is a bit of a conceptual evolution.

“So, there's a degree of uncertainty with aerodynamic evolutions. And, really, the evidence comes only when you test these kinds of things trackside, because even if you have a good wind tunnel correlation, and good CFD correlation, you're always a little bit on the edge of knowledge. And I think this is the same for every team.”

As the development for the 2023 F1 car concludes post this last upgrade, McLaren is gearing up to test the first version of its 2024 F1 car in its new wind tunnel at Woking. The team is yet to decide if that happens before or after the summer break. But it will happen before the Dutch GP at the end of this month. 

The 2023 car was developed at Toyota's wind tunnel. Now that the team has this facility in-house, it would mark the transition of development in their journey. Stella said: 

“We will stop working on the old car as we leave the Toyota wind tunnel. We will not run the old car in the new wind tunnel.

"What we are working on with this year's car, a lot of things are relevant for next year, but this year's model will not be put in the new wind tunnel. The new wind tunnel will only have next year's model.”

In addition, just to clear the air, Stella has also revealed that McLaren won't be using the ideas they get from the 2024 car on the current F1 car, unlike some teams that have talked about it. He said:

“On next year's model, there's not much you can develop that you can apply to this year's car, because things are very interlinked and tangled.

"It's very difficult to have a solution that works on next year’s car, and then you can apply to this year's car.

"You would certainly consider a test item, to see if it works. But even to prepare a test item, it means that somebody will have to release it, draw it, and produce it in a period in which we are completely flat out on next year. So I see it unlikely.”