James Key on McLaren’s biggest problem

Fans are always interested in McLaren affairs, and in the days of the first leg of the season, their attention to the team was heightened, partly due to the fact that the talented Australian Oscar Piastri made his debut in it. Unfortunately in Bahrain he failed to prove himself: according to the results of qualifying he started from a distant 18th position and in the race he retired on lap 13 after an electronics failure in his MCL60.

Lando Norris, his partner, regarded as one of the best drivers of his generation, was also unlucky: technical problems forced him to make six pit stops, losing two laps to the leader at the finish.

It is clear that such disappointing results upset both the team and its fans, but McLaren will do everything it can to rectify the situation as soon as possible. Especially according to Andrea Stella, his leader, the MCL60 is capable of a good pace and without the problems, riders could be competing for points.

However, there are more serious problems, as James Key, technical director of McLaren, spoke after the Bahrain Grand Prix, and they relate to changes in the technical regulations in 2023: we are talking about the fact that the minimum floor height above the track surface has been enlarged by 15 mm.

“Actually, the problems started when we took this step and raised the bottom 15mm,” emphasizes Key.

This was done to prevent cars from throwing at high speeds, which suffered from most teams’ chassis in the first half of last season. The problem was solved, but by reducing the downforce.

“It seems like a fairly small change, but the underside of the new generation car is very large and this is an extremely sensitive area,” continued James. “Look how much downforce it generates. And when we did this with our car, it turned out that the losses were much greater than we could have anticipated.

It seems that this has affected different teams in different ways. This is to some extent due to the geometry of the soil. Last year there were two modernization directions in this area and we probably chose the direction most teams are taking. And when we made the changes, it took a serious hit for us.

We tried to make up for the loss with the knowledge we had at the time, probably last September, and we decided then that we probably needed to change direction and completely rethink the geometry of the bottom.

These are very drastic changes and such projects are very complex. I think that the moment the decision was taken to change the regulations, and the fact that this affected us particularly strongly, led us to take up this task too late.”