Oscar Piastri will be driving the same specification car as Lando Norris for the first time in three races when McLaren brings the final part of its three-stage upgrade to this weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix.
McLaren has completely overhauled its MCL60 after an underwhelming start to the season and a subsequent restructure of its design department, including the sacking of technical director James Key.
The redesign has been so significant it’s taken a month just to manufacture all the new parts, and the workload has been so onerous that the team has been able to supply updates to only one car at a time at the last two races.
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Norris, as the driver placed highest in the championship, was the beneficiary of the first and second stages of the upgrades in Austria and Britain respectively and will complete the cycle this weekend in Hungary.
Piastri received the first stage of the upgrade in Silverstone and will receive the final two stages in Budapest, bringing both cars into alignment in their new specifications for the first time.
Team principal Andrea Stella said the upgrade would be noticeable on Sunday, when McLaren’s lack of performance has been most acute for most of the season.
“For Hungary we have some further upgrades that will help more from the point of view of trying to improve the race pace,” he said, per Racer, describing the final stage of the upgrade process. “This will be available to both drivers — we don’t expect that the specification of the car will not be aligned between Oscar and Lando.”
But the team is keeping expectations in check.
The Hungaroring is a markedly different circuit to Silverstone and the Red Bull Ring. It’s slower and tighter, putting less emphasis on reducing drag and placing greater importance on pure downforce load.
McLaren has been strong all season through high-speed corners but far weaker at slower circuits. It was also less relatively competitive through the slower sections of the Silverstone track.
“In a way we look forward to Hungary to check more comprehensively where we really are,” Stella said. “There is not as much high speed — if anything it is a low and medium-speed dominated track.”
The team is also concerned about the forecast for weather warm weather of around 30°C through the weekend, noting McLaren’s struggles with high tyre wear on hot circuits.
“Another testing territory for us,” Stella said. “We will see.”
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Not everyone shares McLaren’s caution, however.
Mercedes was shell shocked by McLaren’s leap forward at Silverstone, where its engine customer was comfortably quicker in qualifying and race trim.
Lewis Hamilton described the MCL60 as a “rocket ship” after losing the battle for second place against Norris.
George Russell, having been stuck behind Oscar Piastri in a fruitless pursuit of fourth, said he believed McLaren had already proved that the car was adaptable with strong performances in Austria and Britain.
“I see no reason why they shouldn’t be up there now,” he said, per ESPN.
“We’ve come from Red Bull Ring, which is a very different circuit to Silverstone, and they were a small step ahead of us on both occasions.
“I don’t know how they’re found this much performance. It’s been quite surprising.
“It gives us inspiration that it can be possible, but we need to try and turn it up and we need to find more performance and quick.”
Stella played down Russell’s praise, arguing that the differences between Silverstone and Spielberg were overstated.
“When it comes to whether this improvement will manifest itself in the future, even if George says that the tracks are different, actually there are significant elements of commonality between Austria and Silverstone — especially there is a high density of corners in which we know our car performs well.
“[Cool] conditions like [at the British Grand Prix], they do help because they don’t overheat the tyres, which is also something on which we have some work to do.
“I hope George is right, by the way!”
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Piastri, who is yet to sample the Silverstone-spec new parts, said he was keeping an open mind about where the team would shake out in Hungary.
The modern high-downforce F1 car has increased the average speed of even slower tracks like the Hungaroring, which might work to ameliorate the worst of the MCL60’s problems.
“Budapest has quite a few high-speed corners, or at least medium-speed corners, so we’ll see how we go,” he said.
“We’ve proved two weekends in a row now that it wasn’t a fluke. Will we be the second-quickest car in Hungary? I don’t know, but I think we can definitely try and aim for that.”
But Norris, who has had a habit of taking a glass-half-empty view of his car’s potential, was pessimistic about McLaren’s ability to translate the performance from its upgrades to different track configurations.
“We do have a poor car — and I say poor; I would say pretty terrible — in the slow-speed corners. Extremely difficult to drive,” he said.
“We’re going to go to a couple of tracks coming up where I’m sure people are going to be saying, ‘What have you done now? Like, how has it got so bad all of a sudden?’.
“A lot of it is track specific. I don’t want to get too excited, good things have come from the upgrade, but there are still plenty of things which are a miles away from — say, competing in certain places with a Mercedes and as a whole package competing even with a Red Bull.”