F1 News: McLaren’s Stella on the radical approach for their 25 car
(GMM) McLaren has revealed to the world some significant modifications to its title-winning Formula 1 car for the all-new season.
For the last year of the current regulations, each team will undoubtedly base their 2025 car on the previous version. In McLaren’s case, it powered them to the 2024 constructors’ championship.
But McLaren is not resting on those laurels.
The Woking based team on Thursday showed to the world photos of its heavily camouflaged orange and black 2025 car circulating at Silverstone for a ‘filming day’ shakedown.
“The orange and black pattern made it difficult to find new aero tricks,” observed Auto Motor und Sport journalist Tobias Gruner.
“But a closer look showed that the airbox is now flatter and more oval in shape,” he added.
Gruner noted that the nose is also “a bit slimmer”, and that the side mirror mounts are altered.
“We have to remain realistic,” McLaren CEO Zak Brown said. “Every team will come out of the winter break improved.”
In the pages of Italy’s La Gazzetta dello Sport, technical correspondent Paolo Filisetti remarked that although the 2025 McLaren resembles its predecessor, there has been a “profound refinement of the project both at a dynamic and aerodynamic level”.
He also noticed changes to the front and rear suspension, with lower attachment points than before, “striking” differences with a less rounded bodywork profile.
An analysis in France’s Auto Hebdo, meanwhile, noted “more imposing” sidepods with an altered shape of the intakes.
So while McLaren won the constructors’ title in 2024, Lando Norris is now keen to beat quadruple consecutive world champion Max Verstappen to the drivers’ crown.
“I need to get my elbows out and show I’m not going to willingly give him any positions,” the British driver told reporters.
“But I also have to be a smart driver. You have to be smart to go up against Max.”
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McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has opened up about the team’s radical approach to its 2025 car, the MCL39, despite achieving much success with the MCL38 from the 2024 season.
“What we tried to achieve with this new car is innovative. It’s a car in which we tried to raise the bar in many areas, including the fundamental layout.
“It’s something that definitely we evaluated carefully because the MCL38 was already a competitive car, so we needed to be conscious, considerate as to how much we wanted to innovate. But ultimately, we actually went for a relatively challenging approach in terms of how much innovation is in this car. This is predominantly to gain aerodynamic efficiency. At the same time, we still wanted to make some improvements in terms of interaction with the tires, and what you can do to improve long-run pace.
“Pretty much every fundamental component of the layout has been subject to some innovation in order to gain, sometimes not only by marginal gains, some technical opportunities for development. Everything has been subject to optimization, sometimes incrementally, sometimes actually quite substantially.”
“We have just tried to go as fast as possible in terms of developing the car, which means that there will be some updates during the early races of the season, but this would have been the same even without the 2026 changes of regulations looming ahead.
“We are very aware that last season, even if it had been a successful season, the margins we had mean that we had to be aggressive with the car to try and cash in as much performance as possible. Those margins were so small that considering the development that other teams would have had, had we not gone as fast as possible in terms of development, we might very quickly lose any advantage that we had.”
“We kept full gas in terms of development, and we will see if we have been able to develop more than our competitors from the 2024 to the 2025 car.”