With McLaren expecting little impact from tweaking their ‘mini-DRS’ rear wing, CEO Zak Brown said it made sense to show there is no “secret sauce” at play.

McLaren has been on a sharp rise since Andrea Stella took over as team principal in 2023, the team going from having one of the slowest cars at that point to now serving as the benchmark, Lando Norris having carried on the momentum from Oscar Piastri’s win in Baku by dominating the Singapore Grand Prix.

McLaren showed there is no ‘secret sauce’ with rear wing tweak

But it was Piastri’s Baku win which put the spotlight on McLaren’s low-drag rear wing, with footage showing the upper element lifting down the straight to create a gap and thus shed drag.

It raised eyebrows with the likes of Red Bull senior advisor Helmut Marko and Ferrari team boss Fred Vasseur, while Red Bull team principal Christian Horner and technical director Pierre Waché met with Nikolas Tombazis, the FIA’s single-seater technical director, on Thursday night in Singapore to air concerns over McLaren’s rear wing.

That was followed by McLaren confirming that they “proactively offered to make some minor adjustments to the wing following conversations with the FIA.”

And they did this – according to Brown – because they do not see any clear negative in doing so, while it sends a message to rivals that they did not uncover McLaren’s silver bullet.

“Whoever’s winning, everyone’s always staring at the car to understand what they’re doing,” Brown told The Times.

“It’s totally natural that people are staring at our car at the moment and then coming to conclusions, a lot of them incorrectly.

“We’ve passed every single test. We offered to make a small modification, just because we don’t think it will make much of a difference and there’s a lot of noise around it — so to demonstrate that there’s no secret sauce, we were like, ‘Well, we’ll modify it slightly.’

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“They [rivals] wouldn’t be doing their jobs if they weren’t making noise. It’s a compliment that people are looking at our car and challenging. We’ve got good innovation on our car.

“The trick in this sport is to make your car go as fast as possible and to try to slow down everyone else as much as possible. So people are just trying to slow us down. It’s nothing new. If we were running fifth in the championship, no one would care.”

McLaren in fact sit top of the pile in the Constructors’ Championship, their lead over Red Bull 41 points with six rounds of F1 2024 to go.

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