A third round of upgrades for McLaren is designed to deliver improved race pace at next weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix.
McLaren began introducing new parts at the Austrian Grand Prix with Lando Norris before those filtered down to Oscar Piastri at the British Grand Prix.
The team was rewarded with its best result of the season on Silverstone, with Norris second and Piastri fourth – unlucky not to have been on the podium too.
At the start of the year, McLaren stated it had adopted an aggressive development approach after the initial design of the MCL60 fell short of performance targets.
Tyre degradation had been an issue Norris and Piastri have dealt with – the car producing good tyre warmup and therefore pace over a single lap but at the cost of longevity.
In Austria and Britain, those concerns were eased with more consistent pace displayed at both events.
According to team boss Andrea Stella, his squad is looking to drive home that point in Hungary, with more to come in future races too.
“For Hungary, we have some further updates that will help more from the point of view of trying to improve the race pace,” he said when asked about the specifics of the package by Speedcafe.
“This will be available to both drivers and by Hungary, we don’t expect that the specification of the car will not be aligned between Oscar and Lando.
“Like any other team, we will carry on delivering some upgrades to the following races.
“This is also thanks to the fact that, once we started redesigning the car, now we kind of unlocked performance and through iterations, we keep seeing the aerodynamic development being quite effective.
“So you obviously, as soon as you see that a project is mature enough to be the lever, you press the go button and you go, so there will be some more stuff coming even after Hungary.”
The Hungaroring is set to test the revised MCL60, with a greater emphasis on slow- and medium-speed corners – an area the car has struggled with throughout the year.
A positive performance there would underscore the dramatic improvement in form the team has displayed at the most recent two events.
“We look forward to Hungary, to check more comprehensively, where we really are,” Stella said.
“There’s not as much high-speed, if anything, is a low-, medium-speed dominated track – and also you can have hot conditions, which is again, another testing territory for us.
“So yeah, we will see.”
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