The 10 upgrades behind McLaren’s ‘B-Spec’ car that helped Lando Norris to beat Red Bull

From the very first part of the car to the last part of the car, winning races is about bringing it all together. It’s not any one individual component that has to be perfect. If the whole lot is working as one you will end up with a reasonable package.

The gamble that paid off for McLaren in Miami demonstrates the confidence within this team.  An upgrade package, the team said, included a new front wing, new front suspension geometry, a revised front brake duct and winglet, a completely revised floor and new bodywork and engine covers.

In reality, Miami would seem a strange race to introduce such a major upgrade, you’re a long way from home and have limited practice because of it being a sprint weekend, so optimising any development can be really difficult. It was a gamble but in the end it paid off.

When you are arriving at a race track with a whole bunch of new components, it is a big task trying to evaluate them and make sure that something is not tripping you up. It’s very, very easy to miss some characteristic that you can’t get on top of with a limited amount of practice. But McLaren seem to have confidence in their understanding of the car in the simulation and their working approach to get the best out of their car.

They have confidence in their direction. I haven’t seen the changes in great detail but it is quite right that they have started at the front and worked their way through to the back, which in reality is how these cars work: the front wing sets up an airflow structure that the rest of the car has to work with.

If you are doing one bit in isolation, you might for example have a better front wing. But that airflow structure coming off the trailing edge of that wing could affect the rest of the car and overall you end up with a negative.

McLaren’s approach was to introduce a complete package of improvements in many areas – they proved it’s not wrong to go through the car and have a major upgrade as opposed to just random bits.

What was McLaren’s problem?

Their biggest problems this year so far are that the car has had a strange front end characteristic. Braking and turning into low speed corners have also not been good. I’m not saying they have fixed it, but they’ve obviously addressed it with the new front suspension geometry, just trying to be that little bit more sympathetic on the weight distribution across the front axle whenever you put steering lock on the car.

That changes the front tyre grip quite a lot. We heard at the beginning of the weekend, Norris complaining about the car being very heavy, turning to the left being easier than turning to the right. Oscar Piastri also complained about the steering being very heavy so that’s a characteristic that’s come from that suspension geometry change, not always but heavier steering normally means more front grip.

We talk about these things like they’re massive, but they’re not. They’re small changes, which are needed to make sure you’re optimising the use of the tyres, small changes can give small benefits but it also shows you that you are going in the right direction.

You can alter the loading of the front tyres because one of the tools you have is the steering lock. You need to make sure that you load the front tyres up correctly as you apply steering lock because, you only have those four bits of black rubber connecting you with the track and by definition, a low speed corner requires more steering lock than high speed corners. It’s one of the tools in your toolbox to alter the characteristics of how you load the front tyres up. They seem to have got better on that over the weekend but we must wait to see at a couple more circuits to be certain. Everybody was complaining about tyre and grip levels in Miami. There’s a chance that it might not play out all season long, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.

Why McLaren were smart to start changes at the very front of the car

Aerodynamically, they’ve got a new front wing with various changes and it’s about getting all those to work in harmony. It’s the combination of all the bits of the jigsaw and getting it all to work together. McLaren appear to be quite good at that.

Aerodynamically you start improvements at the front of a car. The airflow that the front wing sets up is what the rest of the car works with. Even the front brake duct is part of that. We talk about front brake ducts loosely. In reality, they’re a brake cooling duct but also an aerodynamic device that does a lot of work to control the airflow around the front tyre. Within those wheels are a multitude of different areas where the flow is used for cooling. Obviously you have to cool the brakes but it’s also about managing that flow and making sure that it’s not heating the rim too much, and overheating the tyre or that it’s enough to get tyre temperature quickly. So it’s all a combination of how you manage that flow as to how it treats the rest of the car.

When you introduce air into the brake duct to cool the brakes, you have to exit it somewhere. That’s managing that flow, because that’s quite early on in the flow structure of the car so you want to make sure you’re managing it as best as possible otherwise it can hurt the major downforce producing device, which is the underfloor.

One of the problems has been the drag level of the car. They don’t really have the straight line speed that some of the other cars have. They normally run a little bit more downforce. In Miami that may have helped a little bit because the track was quite slippery, but all I’d say is going there with as many upgrades as they had on Norris’s car, and half of them on Piastri’s, we saw both cars were competitive and is real cause for optimism.

So do we have a new rival to Red Bull?

As I said earlier it’s a big gamble on a sprint weekend hoping that you can get the best out of so many changes. But what else can you ask for than to come away with a race win?

Red Bull and, more loosely, Max Verstappen have really got a handle on how to exploit these regulations. Nearly all the other teams have been playing catch up but McLaren are the one team that really stands out. Their update in the middle of last year for the Austria Grand Prix was a major changing point for them. They brought together things to the track that worked. They did a good job and that trend has continued.

Going into 2024, they had high expectations. Initially, it probably wasn’t just where they wanted it to be but they do seem to have that confidence to say: ‘Well, we’ve got what we’ve got, let’s take the best out of it – recognise the problems and as the season unfolds we will address them’. That’s what they’ve done.

The race win was the icing on the cake but over the weekend they will be just as glad they were competitive throughout. At the beginning, Piastri was running second and he didn’t get left behind by Verstappen. All things being equal, he was hanging on there fairly well. Norris picked up the benefit of losing less time at the pitstop during the safety car, but even at the end of the race, he was quick. He and the team deserved the win.

Red Bull will be keeping an eye in the rearview mirror to see where McLaren are this season. They’re in the ballpark with Ferrari now and could spoil the party every now and again. That’s what Formula One should be about. This year, we’ve had six races and we’ve had three different winners in three different chassis – that’s better than what we’ve seen prior to the start of 2024.