McLaren plans further upgrades to 2021 F1 car after summer break

The Woking-based outfit introduced a raft of upgrades at the Hungaroring to improve its performance in low and medium-speed corners.

Lando Norris’ race was ended prematurely after he was hit by Valtteri Bottas into Turn 1, while Daniel Ricciardo’s afternoon was compromised after picking up significant damage on the opening lap.

Speaking in Hungary, Stella confirmed McLaren there will be further upgrades, although nothing major in the second half of 2021 as attention switches to next year.

“They will not be the last upgrades for this season simply because when you release upgrades then it takes some time to produce them and learn the trackside so there will be a few more,” Stella said. 

“Also in Formula 1 you always keep acquiring some information once you test the parts at trackside because you never get a perfect correlation with the development tools so once you test some upgrades trackside you normally get information for further fine-tuning which doesn’t necessarily require to go past the wind tunnel, you simply can adapt based on some runs in CFD for example associated with what we’ve learnt testing parts trackside. 

“This upgrade in Hungary isn’t the last one, there will be some more tweaks that will be tested in future races. Nothing major but some further will come.”

While the F1 regulations stayed fairly stable between 2020 and 2021, changes to the floor area cut the downforce on the cars significantly.

Stella says McLaren’s focus has been recovering as much downforce as possible back while improving its “aerodynamic efficiency”.

“We’re relatively happy we've achieved what we’ve been able to achieve in this aspect,” Stella added. “The first step was recovering as much as possible from the loss caused by the change of technical regulations for 2021 cars, then what we realised pretty soon that in doing soon, even if we achieved a decent level of aerodynamic efficiency of the car, what we kept is some characteristics of our car which makes it relatively special to drive, I have to say, which in a way we saw even with the experience that Daniel is going through because he came from the opposite hand in terms of how you drive a Formula 1 car. 

“Our car requires some special adaptation. While we worked to improve this aspect, I think it’s no secret that our car is good in high-speed corners for example. It might not be the best car when you have to roll speed in mid-corner, as another example. 

“So while we are trying to adjust some of the characteristics to make it a bit more natural to drive, at the same time what the most important thing is to deliver aerodynamic efficiency so the focus has always been on improving aerodynamic efficiency even if we could necessarily improve these aspects in terms of balance and in terms of extrapolation of the car.”