McLaren waiting to spring FIA ‘surprise’ with next raft of MCL38 upgrades

Andrea Stella confirms McLaren ‘stuff’ coming

Having drip-fed some smaller upgrade steps to the MCL38 since the more significant upgrade package rolled out in Miami, another larger step upgrade is expected to be introduced by McLaren before season end.

That’s according to team boss Andrea Stella, who light-heartedly declined to reveal the nature of the updates as he spoke to media after the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, which was won by McLaren’s Oscar Piastri.

The MCL38 has become F1’s benchmark car through the middle part of the season, performing as the most consistent of the top four teams as Piastri and Lando Norris have grown accustomed to podiums and victories as a major title push is on the cards.

“We are definitely working on upgrades for this season,” Stella confirmed.

“We are now finalising this. I don’t want to disclose too much in terms of what and when, but we do have a plan to make the car faster.

“Whether we will be able to do it or not, we will see, because I think we have seen that, at this level of development, it is not an easy task to actually change the specification of the car and get it to work as you expect in your development tools, but that’s also why we took a bit more time to try and make sure that what we bring trackside is successful.”

With every team required to submit descriptions of tweaked or upgraded components to the FIA, who collate the data to publish on Friday mornings of each Grand Prix weekend, Stella said it’ll be a case of waiting to read said document to discover what McLaren is cooking.

“Yes, I can confirm that we have some stuff coming for the next races,” he said, laughing that “We will see!” when pushed as to whether that may be at this weekend’s Singapore Grand Prix.

“I will let the surprise be in the [FIA] document when they are published.”

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Andrea Stella: Leading Constructors’ Championship a ‘milestone’ for McLaren

McLaren’s victory in Azerbaijan moved the Woking-based squad into the lead of the Constructors’ Championship, overtaking Red Bull to open up a 20-point lead.

It’s the first time since the 2014 Australian Grand Prix – in which Jenson Button and Kevin Magnussen finished second and third in the season opener – that McLaren has led the title chase as the team pursues its first Constructors Championship since 1998.

The ever-practical Stella said that he isn’t giving the achievement much thought at this moment in time.

“I think if I looked at it for a second as a milestone, then it’s definitely huge,” he said.

“Because we don’t have to forget that, at the start of 2023, we were last when we started the season and now we lead the classification.

“That’s a huge milestone that has been possible thanks to the great work, the hard work, and the quality of the work of the entire team, the support from our shareholders, the support from our partners, the fans.

“You achieve this because you achieve it together.

“At the same time, for my way of going racing and for the way I would like the team to go racing, this second is already over. We don’t look at the classification.

“We just focus on executing at every single event, delivering the upgrades that we still plan to take to some of the future races.

“Because the car, as a matter of fact, is still not fast enough to create some boring races – which, if you want, is not in the interest of Formula 1, but is definitely the way in which we want to go racing.

“So we have work to do in terms of making the car faster, and we need to remain humble, and we need to keep our feet on the ground because we see that, in fairness, there’s not much to pick at all between the four top teams.

“When it comes to McLaren, I often hear ‘McLaren best car. McLaren, best car’. I think this is not in the numbers.

“I think, in the numbers, McLaren is the best car in some kind of circuits like Barcelona, Hungary, and Zandvoort – for good technical reasons.

“But, here, I don’t think McLaren did not enjoy any advantage over Ferrari, and I think not even over Red Bull.

“If we see, even in Monza, Mercedes was within 70 milliseconds, or 86 milliseconds, between P2 and P6 so it’s just very, very balanced.

“Here, I think the execution by the drivers and the execution by the team is just what made the difference.”