McLaren believes Daniel Ricciardo’s struggles with his 2021 machine should have a positive impact on his new Formula 1 car as it highlights features that otherwise might not have been explored in the same depth.
Ricciardo’s first year at McLaren in 2021 was a difficult one, despite breaking the team’s eight and a half year drought with victory at Monza. But he was generally outdone by teammate Lando Norris and spent much of the season – especially the first half – adjusting to the car.
But this process also had benefits for McLaren, which led to a deeper understanding of what Ricciardo once called the car’s “peculiar” characteristics.
“It was a learning curve for us because we got a new driver, a very talented driver, an established driver, and he had difficulty driving fast during some phases of driving, which was not possible at all [been noticed] because some drivers might have liked it, ”said McLaren Executive Racing Director Andrea Stella late last year.
“For Lando, for example, this is that [type of] He drove Formula 1, the only car he drove. So he doesn’t have a lot of references from other cars.
“Some features are just how the car behaves in Formula 1. But adding a new driver with very clear references helped us understand that we actually had to improve some of those features.”
Ricciardo came to McLaren from Renault with his most recent experience, and before that with Red Bull.
But while the McLaren was a competitive car, one strong enough to fight Ferrari for third place in the championship – a fight he had lost – Ricciardo struggled to get used to it, and even in his stronger second Halfway through the season he had to endure a few difficult weekends.
The McLaren had high levels of downforce and was aerodynamically efficient, but the car’s weaknesses were areas where Ricciardo traditionally excelled in terms of its ability to carry speed into corners on the brakes.
Instead, Ricciardo often caused instability in the rear or under-revved the car, which was particularly lap-time consuming in corners with a particularly pronounced combined braking / turning phase.
“Some of these functions [that need to be improved] have to do with how sharp the car is when it reacts to a little steering intervention, ”said Stella.
“With the wide tires that we put on for the first time in 2017, it was very clear that they respond very well to small steering interventions. And this can be a good feature, if you have a quick 90 degree turn this is a good feature. But that usually makes the car more difficult to drive.
“As soon as we understand it, the next thing is to drive through the corners with the consistency of the aerodynamics. And we understand that from this point of view there is still a lot to do on our side.
“This year you can bring some of the findings to bear, and we actually did some applications for the car.
“So Daniel switched to the car, but in 2021 the car switched to Daniel a bit.
“A part of what has been learned is essentially carried over as far as possible into the car of the next year.”
While the cars of 2022 will be completely different from their predecessors, the underlying science, principles and ideas on which McLaren’s design and development work is based will be the same as those used for the previous generation of vehicles.
But the positive thing about Ricciardo’s struggles is that it has resulted in more exploration and analysis of the clear weaknesses. Whether this means the 2022 car will be better than it would have been can probably never be said with certainty, given the magnitude of the rule changes.
No knowledge is wasted in Formula 1, however, and McLaren is certainly better off going through this process than it could have been if Ricciardo hadn’t proven such a challenging test case.
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https://formulaone.news/mclaren/top-22-most-expensive-cars-in-the-world
