Since first revealing its 2023 Challenger, the team has been open that the launch spec didn’t meet expectations and a new development path was needed.

The first fruits of this work came at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, as McLaren introduced a revised floor with some very offbeat treatments around the edges.

In fact, McLaren’s update doesn’t look all that different visually, but has a big impact on the way airflow is managed throughout the car, highlighting a fascinating aspect of the current generation of ground-effect mechanicals: that the smallest details matter. .

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella, who has extensive experience as an engineer, said floor designs are crucial to current car performance – but much of the effort to improve them involves invisible tweaks, Or tweaks so minute that they’re nearly impossible to detect.

“For this generation of cars, a lot of what contributes to performance is something you don’t see, it’s under the car,” he explained.

“It’s a big change from the previous generation of cars where the geometry was prescribed as flat. Now there’s no prescription.

“So, if you look down, you’ll see channels that play a pretty important role, and fences that work together.

“You have to get the basic concepts right, which is something we didn’t do at the start of the season, but it also started to become a game of millimeters.

“They have an effect on the stability of the eddy as it moves. And, it has an effect on the dolphins as well.

“In terms of getting the process right, the name of the game now is to understand what are the high-level concepts that you need to focus on developing. Then it’s a real game of millimeters, with many people in the aerodynamics room working on many areas of the car and the floor many iterations.”

Lando Norris, McLaren MCL60

Photography: Steven Tee / motorsport pictures

The fact that small changes can have a big impact on how the airflow interacts with the rest of the car means the upgrade program has to evolve as well.

Where in the past teams might invest heavily in big-ticket items, such as new front and rear wings or fenders, to provide a guaranteed boost in downforce, now teams have to spend more time understanding the detailed implications of each small change.

Modifications to the isolation can no longer be made, as a small tweak to the front element of the floor can cascade into the need for further refinement, all the way to the rear of the diffuser.

“If you change the fence, then you need to adapt to something else,” Stella added. “Everything is connected in three dimensions. It’s hard to find a single detail that works by itself.

“The previous generation of cars was much easier, you could be modular in terms of building the floor, and you could just use the front floor and rework it in the factory.

“It’s very difficult to do that with this one, and it doesn’t work aerodynamically. So it’s a little bit more of a challenge from a development speed standpoint.”

But while it may be harder for teams to develop and improve their cars, there is one factor that turns out to be easier to deal with – and that is the seemingly better correlation between what the factory says the car should do and what actually happens On Tracks. Older-generation cars are less predictable, Stella said.

“I think this generation of cars has better relevance in general, at least in McLaren,” he said.

“The wind tunnel constraints of the previous generation of cars were very limited, not only for logistics but also for real aerodynamic relevance.

“With these cars, a lot of things happen on the floor, and for whatever reason the overall correlation is better. In the previous generation, there were a lot of vortices that were flying in free air and created from the side, for example from barge plates . so that area was always a little tricky for the front wing.

“But this (2023) front wing is farther off the ground. It’s simpler. Even the floor is better associated for some reason. So in general I think it has more to do with how the car came about.”