81 Oscar Piastri, (AUS) McLaren Mercedes during the Hungarian GP, Budapest 18-21 July 2024 Formula 1 World championship 2024.
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F1 News: Spotlight now shines on McLaren’s ‘cheater’ rear wing

Posted by AR1 staff

(GMM) The legality of McLaren’s rear ‘cheater’ wing design is now coming under the spotlight in Formula 1.

As the Woking based team surged to the very front of the grid during the course of 2024, Red Bull in particular pointed at the suspicious flexibility of the papaya-colored front wing.

The FIA, however, gave the design the green light.

But now, after the Azerbaijan GP, detailed images of McLaren’s rear wing are doing the rounds on social media, and are being reproduced by publications such as Diario Sport in Spain and France’s Auto Hebdo.

The images show that when the 2024 McLaren is at speed, the rear wing flattens out to reveal two visible gaps at both extreme edges. The phenomenon is being called a ‘mini DRS’ by some.

It is not known how long the Baku-spec wing has been on the car, but McLaren boss Andrea Stella said at Zandvoort that the car was featuring an upgrade in that area.

“This rear wing should give us a bit more downforce, with a similar amount of drag,” he said at the time. “So it should help us move forward a bit more.”

And at Baku, Stella revealed that more car upgrades are looming soon.

“Yes, we are still working on upgrades for this season,” he confirmed. “We are currently finalizing them.”

When asked if the new parts will debut this weekend in Singapore, McLaren’s Stella smiled: “We’ll see.

“I don’t want to give away too much about what we are doing and when it will happen. But we have a plan to make the car faster.

“I often hear that we have the best car, but you don’t see that on many circuits. We had no advantage here over Ferrari and not even over Red Bull.”

It was only on the 2.2 km straights in Baku that the rear wing upgrades McLaren rolled out a few races ago were made visible: the live footage showed that the leading edge of the DRS flap raised inline with the load when the system was not activated. At high speeds (and therefore under load), it was possible to notice how this small portion of the DRS flap raised slightly, increasing the space between the main-plane and the mobile flap in that small area, creating a “mini-DRS” effect, even when the system was not activated.