It looked a pretty sobering weekend for McLaren to be so far off the pace after being the best car the last couple of years. Is it realistic to hope they can compete this year or is being best of the rest, as Lando Norris was in Melbourne, the best they will be able to do? – Tom
The fastest McLaren in Australia qualified more than 0.8 seconds slower than George Russell’s pole time, and Norris finished the race 51 seconds behind Russell.
And McLaren – world champions for the past two years – admitted their car was not quite on the level of the Mercedes. As team principal Andrea Stella put it: “When we look at the GPS overlays, we see that Mercedes is faster in some of the corners.”
The vast majority of that gap was down to usage of the power unit and the energy recovery system.
It’s clear the works team has more knowledge of how to get the most out of the engine, and it’s equally clear that, with software systems so complex, more information and knowledge translates into a significant advantage on track.
In Melbourne, the Mercedes cars were able to deploy a significant amount more energy on the long run from Turn Six to Turn Nine, where much of the lap time was being lost by McLaren.
F1 rules dictate that manufacturers must supply engines of exactly the same specification to all their teams – works or customer. However, they don’t say they have to share all the information about how to exploit them fully.
After the race, Stella came quite close to expressing frustration with the lack of information McLaren had from Mercedes and their engine company HPP.
“We remain a little puzzled by the difference we see in the data between the speed of our car and the speed of other cars using the same power unit,” Stella said.
“The discussion with HPP about having more information has been going on for weeks because even in testing, we were pretty much going on track, run the car, look at the data, ‘oh, that’s what we have’, good, now we react to what we have.
“That’s not how you work in Formula 1. In F1, what happens on track, you simulate [beforehand]. You know what is happening. You know what you are programming. You know how the car is going to behave.
“You also have your plans as to how you evolve it that you have figured out before because you know what you are expecting from the car.
“This is the first time since we have been a customer team that we feel we are on the back foot even when it comes to the ability to predict how the car will behave and to anticipate how we can improve the car.”
Mercedes’ argument would be that, as a customer, McLaren can’t expect as close a relationship with the engine department as the works team has.
McLaren would probably counter that they accept that, but they feel they should be a lot better informed than they are.
The McLaren car is believed to be a little overweight, so there is lap time to be gained there – even without aerodynamic upgrades, which are in the pipeline.
In theory, the knowledge of how to exploit the engine will come.
The key questions are how long it will take to learn it, and whether starting with extra knowledge is an advantage that keeps on giving.
The systems in the cars keep learning and improving. It’s yet to be seen whether this is a virtuous circle that never stops, or whether Mercedes will reach diminishing returns and McLaren can catch up.
