CjC wrote: ↑30 Sep 2022, 22:17
What I don’t understand is James Key says it should improve slow and medium speed grip and also some efficiency but Lando says it’s a different design that has the same performance as the old design????
To put it in simple terms, the old design was capped… The amount of performance they could extract from it was more limited than the current design… So Level 1 New Concept = Level 10 Old Concept… From a lap time perspective “at Singapore” they yield the same results, but the new concept has more potential for further development, it’s just behaving different to create the lap time, in Lando’s words:
“They’re performing as expected, which is in some ways similar to the way the car felt before the update, with just some small tweaks in the way that it works, and acts, which is what we want.”
At the same time, been a new concept, the operating window has had to change and finding the sweet spot will take a bit of time… If a non-optimized new concept delivers the same lap time as the optimized old concept, that’s a good sign overall.
Beyond that, in my opinion McLaren’s biggest delta to the front doesn’t come primarily from the aero concept, it is mechanical grip that creates the biggest gap and that’s chassis/suspension related.