McLaren Formula 1 team principal Andrea Stella says that the team will investigate why it is losing around “one-and-a-half tenths” to Mercedes in the straights, despite running with a common power unit.
Explaining where the MCL40 is currently stacked against the current championship-leading W17, Stella estimates that the gap between the two cars is around three-to-four tenths per lap, with “70% in the corners and 30% in the straights”.
While the deficit in the corners is somewhat easier to explain, as the McLaren is currently lacking downforce versus the Mercedes, it’s less clear to the team where the shortfall in straightline performance currently lies.
The easy assumption would be that the McLaren is also more draggy and thus unable to reach the same level of acceleration, but the team also feels that it could be a discrepancy in how the two teams operate the Mercedes powertrain.
This was a point mentioned earlier in the year by Stella as Mercedes had an immediate advantage in optimising its own powertrain, although he was keen to outline that he was happy with the dialogue between McLaren and Mercedes’ High Performance Powertrains (HPP) division.
“When it comes to our gap to Mercedes, it’s always been between three and four tenths, it comes in the corners predominantly, probably 70% in the corners and 30% in the straights,” Stella explained in Austria.
“In the corners, it’s very clear why that is the case, it’s the fact that their car generates more downforce than our car, and this is something that we are working on, and we have good projects that will land trackside.
“The 30% happening in the straights, it might have to do with some additional aerodynamic drag that we have on our car, but we are also looking at the way we exploit the power unit, because the speed deficit is quite significant.
“I don’t know if you have access to the GPS overlays, but I think nowadays that’s a really interesting source of information to see the characteristics of the various cars. You will be able to see that, for instance, there’s probably one-and-a-half tenths, one tenth at least, that we lose in the straights, and definitely we need to go and look into why that is the case.”
Oscar Piastri, McLaren
Photo by: Steven Tee / LAT Images via Getty Images
Stella added that “reverse-engineering” the problem was difficult, particularly when attempting to delineate between the two potential causes of the car’s reduced efficacy on the straights.
While HPP is assisting McLaren with helping the team unlock further gains in terms of energy deployment, Stella offered a simple explanation to help it understand the issue: cut the MCL40’s drag, and see if there’s still a deficit.
“The outcome is that there is a few kph difference, but there could be multiple sources and this is a typical problem when you reverse engineer competitors; you can’t effectively distinguish what’s the drag from what’s the from what’s the power unit,” he said.
“I think when we were talking about exploitation at the start of the season it was more in relation to the sensitivities to deployment. You know, deployment is very sensitive to driving style, very sensitive to how you distribute the deployment over the lap.
“From this point of view, there’s been good progress, and good collaboration with HPP. We now have better tools thanks to the fact that HPP has helped the development of our tools and we have a more effective collaboration.
“I think we are better in terms of exploiting the power unit from an electrical energy deployment. But there’s also the ICE power that we should consider, and like I said I cannot talk about differences from a power unit point of view, because just assuming that the power unit is the same – there may be differences from a drag point of view.
“I think it’s fair to concede that Mercedes will have less drag than us, we have different ratios, this may have an effect. There may be some other sources, the only thing I know and the only thing that is under our control is that we need to minimise all the sources of drag on the MCL40 – and this is what we are concentrating on, while we keep a very tight collaboration with HPP.”
Additional reporting by Ronald Vording.
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