McLaren has presented the livery its car will race in during the 2024 Formula 1 season.
The team will revert to their regular naming convention for Formula 1 cars last year having broken their recent trend to mark the team’s 60th anniversary last year.
McLaren is yet to reveal the design of its new car, which will be launched on February 14th. But it has revealed its colour scheme in images issued today.
They head into 2024 off the back of a promising campaign the previous year. The team finished the season in fourth place and took seven podium finishes from the last eight races as a strong development push gave them a strong claim to being the second-quickest team behind dominant champions Red Bull.
“We didn’t start 2023 as we wanted,” said McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brownm “but Andrea [Stella, team principal] and the team did a great job following the organisational restructure coming into action, and the hard work continues as we carry that excellent momentum into the 2024 campaign.”
Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri will be team mates for a second year at McLaren.
“I’m confident the exciting pairing of Lando and Oscar will continue to create more mega memories together after such an impressive second half of last year which saw the team finish fourth in the championship with 302 points,” said Brown. “These are all steps forward from the year before as we continue our mission to push and compete at the front of the grid.”
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Since the new year began McLaren has welcomed the arrival of two major hires in its technical division: Rob Marshall, technical director for engineering and design, and David Sanchez, technical director for car concept and performance.
The team’s new car will carry the name MCL38, it revealed. Last year’s car was called the MCL60.
This marked a departure from the team’s recent nomenclature, which began after Zak Brown took over in charge of McLaren Racing, and is the third used by the team. Since 2017 the team’s car names have used the prefix MCL, beginning with the MCL32.
The team carried on the numbering used when Ron Dennis and his Project Four operation took over McLaren in the early eighties. The first car produced under his leadership, originally called the MP4 and later referred to as MP4/1, was a pioneering design featuring F1’s first carbon fibre chassis.
The MCL38 will be the 71st F1 car produced by McLaren. The first was the M2B, which team founder Bruce McLaren entered in six rounds during the 1966 season. Prior to that the team built an experimental, unraced single-seater called the M2A. Its first design, the M1A, was a sports car.
The team hasn’t won a race since 2021, when Daniel Ricciardo scored the only victory for an ‘MCL’-era McLaren in his MCL35M at Monza.
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