The Azerbaijan Grand Prix was the first weekend of the rest of McLaren’s season. For a pleasant change of fortune for Woking, it seemed to go quite well.
McLaren started the 2023 season badly undercooked. It had realised late last year that the car it was developing for this season wasn’t going to be any good, having missed the significance of a rule tweak to the floor.
A rapid direction change was required, but it put the team more than a month behind schedule. The car that debuted in Bahrain and raced until Australia was therefore the unfinished abandoned car, one that had missed key performance targets for the season.
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The team said it wouldn’t be until the Azerbaijan Grand Prix that its first significant upgrade would arrive to put the car where it should have been in March. It amounted to a new floor — the most important performance part on the car — that was designed not only to be more powerful but to be upgradeable.
While the jury remains out of the second count, on the first we can begin to draw some conclusions, albeit based on a sample size of a single circuit.
“The data confirmed that what we measured trackside is in line with expectation from the development tools, so that’s really positive news for McLaren,” team principal Andrea Stella said at the weekend. “The new concept of floor seems to work. We see this in the data.
“I think we see this a little bit in lap time in terms of competitiveness this weekend, which is another bit of positive news.”
We can see some preliminary signs of progress on the track.
At the first three rounds of the season McLaren was an average of 101.59 per cent off the pace in qualifying, which translated to 1.434 seconds around a normalised 90-second lap.
That put it seventh in the rankings in terms of pure pace and 0.425 seconds behind Alpine, which is the midfield benchmark in fifth.
But in Azerbaijan it was significantly closer to the pace, closing the gap to pole to 101.08 per cent, or 1.078 seconds on that normalised lap. It was the fifth-fastest car in qualifying behind only the established frontrunning four.
“I think we definitely have [made a step forward],” Oscar Piastri said. “Encouraging that the first step has worked. I know the team are pushing as hard as possible, so exciting to see what the future holds.”
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Norris was buoyed that the update had made a performance difference at a track that shouldn’t have played to its strengths.
“Baku was not the track where we will show its potential,” he said. “Miami we will maybe understand a bit more, and some of the high-speed corners, because that was more where it was aimed at.
“Here we weren’t expecting a lot, but it’s done what it’s done, what it was meant to do, so I’m happy with that.”
But of course there are some major caveats here.
This is just one round, and Baku is a very particular circuit. Though Norris expects the upgrade to yield more gains this weekend in Miami, it’s difficult to be certain the upgrade is as adaptable as anticipated without a broader sample size.
That problem is enhanced by the fact the MCL60 was expected to be relatively more competitive at the circuit regardless of the update, just as it was in Saudi Arabia, where Piastri delivered the team its first Q3 appearance.
Further, Norris was quick to point out that many of the car’s deficits have remained despite the upgrade.
“I think if we look back to Bahrain and Saudi, we still have similarish struggles to what we had then if we were to go back there now. It’s not like we’ve fixed them and it’s a different car,” he said.
“The upgrade was a help, also the new wing, the adjusted wings and things like that, which have also helped, but [on] straight-line speed we’re still the slowest car.
“It’s still our biggest weakness, which makes our life in the race very, very difficult for us to push in the corners, and [we] just get eaten up in the straight quite easily.”
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The McLaren’s speed problem is laid bare by the speed gun at the start-finish straight during Friday qualifying, when the track was at its fastest.
Telemetry data suggests Piastri was able to reach a top speed of 330 kilometres per hour down the front straight, the slowest maximum velocity of any constructor.
Max Verstappen tripped the gun at 342 kilometres per hour.
The fastest Alpine logged around 335 kilometres per hour.
Considering how little passing there was on Sunday even when some cars had the advantage of DRS, you can understand why every kilometre counts.
There’s also the fact that Alpine, which is still widely considered the midfield leader, had a horror weekend in Baku that featured car fires and crashes for Pierre Gasly and pit-lane starts for Esteban Ocon.
Alpine also brought a large upgrade package to Azerbaijan but couldn’t set it up for the painful lack of running time. However, the team believes it’s seen enough to know the new parts are working as expected.
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The goalposts never stay in place in Formula 1, and there’s clearly still work to do for McLaren. Earlier this year Stella admitted there was a significantly larger B-spec update in the works for before the August break and another big upgrade due in the second half of the season.
But a gain is a gain, and after the turmoil of the pre-season and the early races and after having restructured the technical department, any step forward is welcome.
“It all adds up, and I definitely think it’s an improvement,” Norris said. “It’s more the new philosophy of floor, which is the big thing, and it’s the baseline of the future, and down the line we can try to optimise this floor a lot more and take some bigger steps forward.”