Red Bull has set its sights on McLaren: after years in which the single-seater “vivisted” at each GP was the one from Milton Keynes, it is now the turn of the MCL38 to receive the greatest attention from the pit lane, since the papaya car turns out to be the “universal” one that best adapts to every track and which is currently indisputably the most competitive.
The technicians led by Pierre Waché have put McLaren under observation, looking for the reasons that led Andrea Stella’s team to overtake the world champion team.
Red Bull engineers had noticed a strange detail: on each brake basket of the MCL38 there was a small hole, while the carbon element that dresses each corner by regulation should be completely closed.
As is standard practice in these cases, the FIA was asked for clarification on the solution if it was not compliant with the F1 technical regulations.
According to what was anticipated by our German colleagues at AutoMotor und Sport, McLaren had found a way to exploit the small hole used in free practice to install a sensor useful for reading the temperature of the corner, even during the weekend (qualifying and race): from the moment you enter the parc fermé it becomes strictly forbidden.
The Woking team, on the other hand, would have run the cars of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri with the holes open in the Spielberg Sprint race. To gain what advantage? The answer is quite simple: with ground effect single-seaters there is the need to avoid overheating the tires with the heat that is generated by the braking system.
McLaren MCL38: the air intake feeds the brake cooling, but also the gap between the two baskets
Photo by: Giorgio Piola
All the teams studied corners with double baskets in an attempt to isolate the tires from the heat source: the first carbon cover wraps the caliper and disc and with a specific duct extracts the hot air towards an outlet located behind the brake duct. With the second basket, instead, a cavity is created in which a fresh flow is channeled, drawn from a portion of the air intake.
McLaren, therefore, would have benefited from a (small) advantage in the Spielberg Sprint race won by Max Verstappen: Piastri (second) and Norris (third) had “controlled” the thermal degradation of the tyres and were able to be very fast in the final phase of the race, while their opponents had been forced to slow down.
McLaren MCL38: The basket is already closed for the Austrian GP qualifying
Photo by: Franco Nugnes
The FIA, on the advice of Red Bull, had carried out checks, requiring the Woking team to close all the holes when the parc fermé reopened, before qualifying and the Austrian race. McLaren, therefore, after the “reminder” of the federal stewards, complied. Andrea Stella’s team was lucky, because the fact emerged in a Sprint event, in which it is possible to intervene on the single-seaters between the race and the rest of the GP weekend, because otherwise Red Bull could have protested the McLaren technical irregularity with a complaint at the end of qualifying or at the end of the race for the theoretical failure to comply with article 3.13.2 of the F1 Technical Regulations.
The International Federation, in reality, considered the advantage of the McLaren solution very modest and limited itself to advising the Woking team to close the holes with adhesive tape. In the Austrian GP and the subsequent British GP it did not seem that the MCL38s had lost competitiveness due to the holes closed with tape. One thing is certain: in F1 the devil is in the details…
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