2026 McLaren Mastercard F1 Team

[mwillems]

And you can win with boring sidepods

We aren't going to let Emag live this down are we?

Ahahahahaha

What's that thing they say about CFD goggles...

On a serious note, every year computational power increases, design tools get more complex and the idea of a concept becomes a lot more micro.

There's probably a lot of different flows on the car with each area having it's own concept.

Lot's of little changes making big differences.

I also suspect they are doing more with the underfloor than the regs originally envisaged.

[FittingMechanics]

Great win by NOR, he was flying today, actually all weekend to that matter. I feel gutted for PIA, even thogh he could have won due to positional driving, he lost the place to NOR and then his gearbox failed....

On the other hand, this is the 3rd consecutive year in 2 different rules set that Mclaren have billed a race winning car. To me this is a great sing how strong the technical department is at the moment.

And they did it this year with least amount of wind tunnel time and as a customer where Mercedes was deliberately withholding information. Great work by the technical team.

[mwillems]

What I was saying, badly, is that every year the details are smaller and greater in number, with ideas of what makes the cars work getting further and further from our sight

[FittingMechanics]

What I was saying, badly, is that every year the details are smaller and greater in number, with ideas of what makes the cars work getting further and further from our sight

Yeah I think that this is very true. You can probably gain a lot of laptime by just iterating on your initial design without any radical changes. This seems to be what McLaren was doing.

One thing that was interesting to me was that Lando said in the press conference that he didn't think the pace was that good in FP1 and was feeling down because of it and that Stella wanted to make a bet on it. I guess Stella really trusted the development team and the package that was brought.

[mwillems]

What I was saying, badly, is that every year the details are smaller and greater in number, with ideas of what makes the cars work getting further and further from our sight

Yeah I think that this is very true. You can probably gain a lot of laptime by just iterating on your initial design without any radical changes. This seems to be what McLaren was doing.

One thing that was interesting to me was that Lando said in the press conference that he didn't think the pace was that good in FP1 and was feeling down because of it and that Stella wanted to make a bet on it. I guess Stella really trusted the development team and the package that was brought.

I spose the other point I make badly, is that people hear "concept" and see an all encompassing design. Whilst the car works in a synergy (Sorry if you hate that word), the reality is far more complex.

As much as there is time in exotic designs. There's likely huge amounts of time simply from getting all the surfaces to work in Harmony.