This seems to be becoming the year the accepted norms of Formula 1 competition have changed.
It used to be that if you started the year with a poor car, you were pretty much stuck with a poor car for the entire season — particularly if you were in the midfield, where you couldn’t just spend your way out of problems.
Some circuits would suit your machine better than others, but without the fresh start of a new season, it was difficult to out-develop your rivals fast enough to make up for your slow start as well as the lost time spent troubleshooting.
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And even once you got to work on your car for the following season, you had to be realistic about how much progress you could really make. Sometimes you’d be lucky and you could reverse engineer your problems to a single decision, roll back to that point and start again. But other times it would be a laborious multiyear slog to get back to competitiveness.
Some teams get stuck in the wilderness for decades. The once great Williams team has won just two races in the last 20 years.
Yet in the space of a single season — in the space of around six months in fact — two teams have completely bucked these generations-old trends.
Aston Martin was the first, bursting from the blocks at the start of the season with a car that has been second-best to only Red Bull Racing for much of the campaign. A more consistent Lance Stroll would surely have the team up to second in the constructors standings ahead of Mercedes.
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Truthfully Aston Martin’s recovery started more than a year ago with its major upgrade at the 2022 Spanish Grand Prix, which set it its current development path, a similar one to that explored by Red Bull Racing.
However it happened, it’s been a remarkable turnaround and one of the big stories of the season.
But McLaren’s comeback could be set to eclipse it.
McLaren’s two-four finish at Silverstone — let’s call it a moral double podium, for it was only a badly timed safety car that dropped Oscar Piastri to fourth — was remarkable for how easy it looked.
The MCL60, which started the season in Bahrain as the slowest car in the sport, was untouchable in second. It was even quick enough for Lando Norris to dream of pole the day before.
The team’s massive mid-season upgrade package, of which the final of three instalments is due at next weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix, has delivered a remarkable step forward.
Of course the team doesn’t expect to be quite so powerful at every circuit. Silverstone’s rapid layout of mostly super-fast corners and cool weekend conditions played to the car’s strengths. The upcoming race in Budapest, on the other hand, comprises mostly slow and medium-speed bends and will be much more challenging.
But even so, the team is confident its progress is significant and real, even if the order of magnitude won’t be clear without a larger sample size.
“The improvement seems to be genuine, even in terms of race pace,” team principal Andrea Stella said, per Autosport.
“I keep being prudent that we may be flattering a bit the situation thanks to these conditions, but I think it‘s fair to acknowledge that the car seems to be more competitive in the race as well.”
So how can it be that McLaren has turned itself from an easybeat into one of the leaders in the less than five months since pre-season testing, when the extent of the team’s problems became clear?
While there’s never a silver bullet in Formula 1, one particular regulation is surely playing a large role.
It’s all in appendix 7 of the sporting regulations: aerodynamics testing restrictions.
As part of its efforts to equalise the sport and help foster a narrower field spread, Formula 1 and the FIA have come up with several equalisation measures.
One of them is the budget cap, whereby every team has the same amount of money to spend on generating performance.
The other is these restrictions, which limit teams to a certain number of wind tunnel runs and simulations with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software.
These allowances are doled out based on championship finishing order. The team that won the title gets the least amount of development time, while the team at the bottom gets the most.
Let’s take a look at what the teams had to play with for the first six months of 2023, when McLaren got to work on its big upgrade package.
The below list references wind tunnel runs only. For every run in the wind tunnel a team is permitted 6.25 CFD simulations.
Wind tunnel runs from 1 January until 30 June this year
Red Bull Racing: 201.6 runs
Ferrari: 240 runs (extra 19.05 per cent compared to Red Bull Racing)
Mercedes: 256 runs (extra 26.98 per cent)
Alpine: 272 runs (extra 34.92 per cent)
McLaren: 288 runs (extra 42.86 per cent)
Alfa Romeo: 304 runs (extra 50.79 per cent)
Aston Martin: 320 runs (extra 58.73 per cent)
Haas: 336 runs (extra 66.67 per cent)
AlphaTauri: 352 runs (extra 74.60 per cent)
Williams: 368 runs (extra 82.54 per cent)
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You’ll note Red Bull Racing has disproportionately fewer runs than the rest. That’s because the team had its allocation reduced by 10 per cent for breaching the cost cap in 2021. That penalty expires on 26 October this year.
McLaren has therefore had more wind tunnel time to play with relative to most of the teams it jumped in Silverstone, including more than 40 per cent on top of Red Bull Racing’s allowance.
While McLaren would always have had to devote most of its allowance to this mega upgrade — which the team says will change every aerodynamic surface by the time it’s completed — having that extra percentage relative to its main rivals means it’s been able to explore deeper down the development path before committing to building the final parts.
Every wind tunnel run helps to find extra tenths and hundredths of a second. The value of the accumulation of those extra runs can be huge.
“Once we started redesigning the car, we kind of unlocked performance,” Stella said, per Autosport. “And through iterations we keep seeing the aerodynamic development being quite effective.
“As soon as you see that a project is mature enough to deliver, you press the go button and you go, so there will be some more stuff coming even after Hungary.”
The more refined the upgrade, the most likely you are to squeeze more from it through set-up once you get to the track too.
“Sometimes you actually find surprises,” Stella said. “Like these upgrades that we have taken to Austria and here — numerically, we weren‘t expecting this improvement from a lap time point of view.
“Clearly the indications from the race are quite encouraging.”
The beauty of McLaren’s timing with its upgrade package, which more than tripled its score and put it up to fifth in the constructors championship, is that it arrived in July, after the development allowances for the second half of the year were set.
It means the team is down one place relative to where it was last year, gaining it additional wind tunnel time for the next six months.
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Wind tunnel runs from 1 July to 31 December
Red Bull Racing: 201.6 runs (224 runs from 26 October)
Mercedes: 240 runs (down 16 runs)
Aston Martin: 256 runs (down 64 runs)
Ferrari: 272 runs (up 32 runs)
Alpine: 288 runs (up 16 runs)
McLaren: 304 runs (up 16 runs)
Alfa Romeo: 320 runs (up 16 runs)
Haas: 336 runs (unchanged)
Williams: 352 runs (down 16 runs)
AlphaTauri: 368 runs (up 16 runs)
McLaren has 150.79 per cent more development time than Red Bull Racing until October this year and then 135.71 per cent afterwards.
In the pursuit to consolidate the gains it’s making with this update package, along with another major upgrade the team has foreshadowed for the second half of the year, these are important numbers.
The fact that Mercedes and Aston Martin will be adjusting to decreases in wind tunnel time — significantly so in Aston Martin’s case — will surely only help McLaren’s cause.
The aerodynamic testing restrictions aren’t a silver bullet. More time in the wind tunnel doesn’t automatically lead to better development. Red Bull Racing has taken a big step forward despite having the least amount of development time, for example, while Williams has barely made up ground on the pack.
But if you have a team of engineers who bring good ideas to the table and use the time wisely, it can be enormous advantageous — which is exactly what these rules are designed to do.
These regulations reward smarter work, not necessarily harder work. It’s too early to say, but on the evidence of its latest upgrade, McLaren certainly seems to be working cleverly enough to make the most of them.