WATCH OUT RED BULL: HUGE MCLAREN UPGRADE BOOST CONFIRMED FOR UPCOMING RACES

In the wake of Lando Norris’ breakthrough F1 victory, Will Joseph has warned rivals there’s more to come from McLaren’s upgraded MCL38 as other circuits will “favour” it more than Miami.

Miami took a gamble by putting a heavily revised car on the track at the Miami International Autodrome, doing so on a Sprint weekend with just one practice hour.

More to come from McLaren’s upgraded MCL38

The full package was only available for Norris’ No.4 McLaren. However, finishing down in 16th place in FP1, his race engineer Joseph revealed “hearts began to race” at McLaren before they set about improving the car’s set-up.

It came together on Sunday as the Briton beat Max Verstappen to the chequered flag to claim his maiden Formula 1 Grand Prix victory.

Given that last season Norris was 17th in Miami and this year he was P1, Joseph believes there are other circuits to come that will suit the McLaren F1 car “more” than the American track.

“I am not sure,” he said of the performance gain. “We put them on the car, the same like we did in Austria [2023] when we put on a big package.

“We discussed at length what risks we were taking, and how we would try to put those risks aside. And, when things behave it is easy, and if things don’t behave then it’s difficult.

“In P1, we had an issue and our hearts begin to race and then it’s about how you recover from this.

“But, we have faith in the process that we work to. And, we discuss this, and it builds and just comes together.

“The package should favour other circuits more than it does here in Miami. We shall see.”

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McLaren’s gains reportedly worth ‘four-tenths’ of a second

Although Joseph wouldn’t put a number to it, according to Formu1a.uno the full upgrade package that Norris ran in Miami is “worth four-tenths” of a second.

That was just “less than half of the step forward” from the package that Oscar Piastri, the Aussie’s MCL38 not carrying the new floor and sidepods.

The full package, it reports, not only increased the aerodynamic efficiency of the MCL38, but it also widened the car’s set-up window. That opened the door for McLaren to run a less loaded rear wing.

“We were able to do this because we introduced the new package,” explained team boss Andrea Stella. “When you update the car with a new specification of the floor and sidepods, you try to make the car more efficient to avoid increasing the load through the wing rear.”

The package also meant McLaren was able to improve the car’s performance in the slow-speed corners with Stella saying: “We made a conscious decision to set the car up to maximise low-speed performance.

“The decent performance we achieved in those areas is not necessarily down to the characteristics of the package but is also down to some conscious decisions about how to set up the car to ensure it would be as strong as possible at low speed.”

McLaren are third in the Constructors’ Championship with 125, 62 behind Ferrari and 61 ahead of Mercedes.

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2024-05-07T07:16:11Z dg43tfdfdgfd