An error and poor timing hampered McLaren's front-row bid in sprint qualifying at the Chinese GP. But the earlier practice session revealed its pace advantage, says Mark Hughes, who has an idea of where the car's superiority comes from
Riding kerbs doesn't appear to heat McLaren's tyres in the same way that it does for rivals
Just how big an advantage does McLaren have this year?
Mercedes’ George Russell, for one, believes it is big. As in very big. Listen to what he had to say about it in Shanghai. “The gap they have this year on everybody is bigger than Red Bull has ever had.”
Pardon? Did we hear that right? Bigger than Red Bull had in 2023 when it won all but one race?
“They’re clearly doing something better than the rest, clearly substantially quicker than everybody when the tyres are getting hot. We saw that in the Bahrain test. We saw it in sector three in qualifying [in Melbourne]; they were four-tenths faster than everyone else in sector three. Same car they had in sector one and two, only difference is tyre overheating. There is some room for us to improve but we don’t feel like there are masses of opportunities, it’s quite tightly controlled. So they’re clearly doing something pretty trick and that gap is huge.”
McLaren’s Oscar Piastri believes George has got himself spooked out and that the advantage is nothing like as he describes, calling his assessment, “Pretty far-fetched… Clearly our car was very strong in Melbourne, no denying that. We got to a place where it was also handling well… George is coming up with some funny things in the last couple of weeks. So we’ll see, just one race, it’s been a track that’s been competitive for us the last couple of years even when our car wasn’t ‘even more dominant than a Red Bull’. We’ll definitely go to tracks where we’ll struggle more. If he wants to write off his season after the first weekend then I’ll let him do that, but we’re very aware that Melbourne was an exceptional weekend rather than what we’re expecting to be the norm.”
That said, in the opening practice session for this weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix, Lando Norris’s McLaren had 0.4sec on everyone. Piastri was on the same pace until running wide at the final corner. But what is interesting is that the pattern of the McLaren’s superiority over the lap is so similar to qualifying in Melbourne, with the big gain coming in the final sector. Comparing Norris’s lap with that of second-fastest Charles Leclerc in the Ferrari, Norris is 0.011sec (0.045%) faster in the first sector, 0.137sec (0.5%) faster in the middle sector and a whopping 0.306sec (0.78%) faster in sector 3. The McLaren’s advantage, whatever its source, is being translated through better control of the tyre temperatures at the end of the lap. Which is not necessarily just about downforce, but can also be suspension compliance and/or how progressively the load transfers onto the rear tyres on corner entry.
In a race the drivers won’t be anything like flat-out as they endeavour to get the stint lengths needed to optimise their race strategy. So looking at the race in Melbourne, not only were they on intermediates and a much cooler track, but they were not pushing too hard and for the first few laps the chasing Red Bull of Max Verstappen was able to track Norris quite closely. But his rear tyres finally surrendered on lap 17, he ran wide and Piastri got past. From then on, the Red Bull’s pace (and those of the following Mercedes and Ferrari) collapsed spectacularly compared to the McLaren (see graph above). So we see the same pattern as in a qualifying lap but expressed in a different way during the race. The McLaren is hanging onto rear tyre performance way longer, controlling the rubber’s temperatures much more effectively.
“I don’t think the balance [in Melbourne] was the main issue,” said Verstappen of his Red Bull. “I just ran out of tyres in the last sector, overheating, I think a lot of teams were struggling with that but it just seemed like McLaren wasn’t as much. I think overall we know that on bumps and kerbs we’re not very, very good now. Melbourne is not the bumpiest track but still a few bumps in some areas, that is definitely something that I picked up on. The rest of the corners, I think in the very high-speed we are not too bad.”
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By
Mark Hughes
Watching out on track in the middle sector at Melbourne, the McLaren didn’t appear to have any more sheer downforce than the Red Bull or Mercedes. But it rides like a limo in comparison to them. Their harsher inputs into the tyres over the bumps and kerbs will spike up the tyre temperatures and it’s a cumulative process; the tyre doesn’t get to recover fully before there’s another spike – and gradually the temperature creeps up. Once it’s past a certain temperature threshold, it’s never going to regain that earlier performance. The McLaren is somehow keeping the temperatures in that sweet zone and that seems the source of its current superiority.
Norris has already made the point that there will be tracks the car won’t suit as well. So what we are seeing so far may not turn out to be fully representative. Even Russell accepts this, saying, “They may struggle when it’s cold, they seem clearly better than everyone else at cooling their tyres… like last year at Vegas [where it was very cool] they were nowhere so I suspect potentially on these outlier circuits they might struggle.”
