The Las Vegas Grand Prix is a key race for McLaren in the context of the drivers’ championship, and Andrea Stella has revealed how the team plans to approach the weekend. Last year’s Las Vegas GP did not go according to plan for McLaren, and this year the team is aiming for redemption. Andrea Stella, team principal of the Woking-based squad, shared what went wrong last season and how the team has worked to adjust certain aspects in order to remain competitive on a circuit like Las Vegas.
Learning from the past
One of the main issues affecting McLaren at last year’s Las Vegas race was tyre graining caused by the aerodynamic setup. Andrea Stella admitted: “Last year, Las Vegas was one of the toughest races. We struggled with tyre behaviour, both in qualifying, because we were not fast, and during the race, due to severe graining. We also experienced some aerodynamic problems: when we tried to reduce rear-wing downforce, we noticed a loss in efficiency. Additionally, we faced some challenges with the car’s setup as we tried to compensate for the graining and a bit of understeer.”
However, the events of 2024 have been used by the Woking team as a learning experience for this year’s Las Vegas GP: “So, reviewing last year’s Las Vegas race gave us a lot of information to try to find a way to improve.”
Addressing the challenges
The problems identified have been studied in detail to allow for improvements. “I would say that, in terms of tyres, aerodynamic efficiency, and car setup, we know in which direction we need to intervene compared to last year. Will it be enough to be competitive now? We will only find out in Las Vegas. But certainly, we have taken measures in response to what we observed last year, because the performance was definitely not sufficient,” Andrea Stella concluded.
Leave a Reply