Managing the McLaren MCL39 in Formula 1’s Current Ground-effect Ruleset

The final season of Formula 1’s current ground-effect ruleset has seen a familiar challenge up and down the grid – cars that are quick but difficult to drive. This was evident in Lando Norris’ performance during the sprint race in China, where he labored to eighth place after dropping three positions on the opening lap, and had a messy qualifying session en route to fourth on the grid. In stark contrast, his teammate Oscar Piastri capitalized on the right moment in the sprint to relieve Max Verstappen’s Red Bull of second place, then qualified his MCL39 on pole position for Sunday’s grand prix.

Adapting Driving Style for Optimal Performance

Norris has admitted that he has had to modify his preferred attacking style to get the best out of the new McLaren, which doesn’t have a robust enough front end to reward a late-braking style. This was evident in China, where he looked scrappy at times compared to his seemingly effortless win in the Australian Grand Prix. After qualifying, Norris spoke about the difficulties in managing the front tyres, of knowing when to push and when not to push. The Shanghai circuit is something of an outlier in F1 since the layout punishes the front wheels more than the rears: the tightening radius of the first two corners, and the fast entry to the back straight, load up the front-left.

Norris was one of several drivers to have difficulties carrying speed through Turns 1 and 2, and he experienced several lock-ups going into the hairpin at the end of the back straight. “There’s a couple of things – one mainly related to the behaviour of the tyres on this surface, and the other one I think is more related to the behavior of the car – that make exploiting the car at the limit a bit difficult,” said team principal Andrea Stella.

Overcoming Limitations for Improved Performance

“This is the same for both drivers, but I think it’s more of a penalty for Lando, given his driving style and the way he wants to generate lap time. On both things, the one related to the tyres and the one related to the car, there’s not much we can do – we just have to adapt,” Stella explained. The team will need to make improvements in long runs, as Norris experienced quite a lot of graining during the sprint, which hindered his progress, while Piastri coped with the tyres more comfortably. However, it’s also true that he had less dirty air.

Stella would not go into specifics about what the limitations of the car are, but he admitted they were not factors which could be “changed from one day to the other” – it is a fundamental car characteristic rather than something which can be dialled out through set-up. The sensitivity of the Pirelli tyres, of course, is the same for everyone. If Norris suffered more than Piastri from graining in the sprint race because he had more ‘dirty air’ by dint of being caught in a DRS train with Yuki Tsunoda, Kimi Antonelli, and Lance Stroll ahead, arguably his bigger problem was in extracting one-lap performance in qualifying on new soft-compound tyres. Having set respectable times in the second phase of both the sprint qualifying and main qualifying sessions, he lost time to snaps and lock-ups in the final phases.

“Somehow when he tried to find the last one or two tenths that you normally would find when you put a couple of new sets, then I think he hits this sort of behaviors that I refer to without being specific,” explained Stella. “And this means that actually for him, it works better when he’s at 99% of his potential. When he tries to extract the 100, actually things trip over a little bit.”