When a team wins, it comes under scrutiny from rival teams and, consequently, the FIA. Doubts about how someone might gain a significant advantage over the competition lead to speculations about solutions that may exist in the so-called “grey areas,” potentially even going beyond that in some cases, especially when the advantage is found in the final year of regulations. In this sense, the McLaren MCL39 is astonishing everyone with its dominant performances, and rivals are questioning the nature of this advantage. Toto Wolff tips his hat and praises his client team. “Pointing fingers at something illegal is not correct. I know the integrity of Stella, Brown, Marshall, and everyone working at Woking. They are just doing a better job than we are,” said the Mercedes CEO & Team Principal. Compliments also come, at least publicly, from Christian Horner (Red Bull), though behind the scenes, he has been trying harder than any other team to uncover the secrets of the papaya team.
Tire Management the Winning Ace of McLaren: The ‘Secret’ Also Lies in the Brake Ducts
Analyzing the start of this season, it has been evident that McLaren’s peak performance is superior but not unattainable for the other teams. On certain circuits, the fastest ones, and/or in certain conditions, such as colder temperatures, the MCL39 can be beaten, or at least the gap becomes significantly smaller. Additionally, the papaya car faces the biggest ‘difficulties’ in qualifying, leading Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris to make more mistakes on Saturdays. “Now we have enough data to confirm that our car is easier to drive in race trim than in qualifying. So far, we haven’t done a perfect qualifying lap, although Oscar’s lap in Bahrain was very close,” said Andrea Stella. As a result, Mercedes and Red Bull have managed to close the gap and even beat the papaya duo’s fastest laps in qualifying.
However, the main difference between McLaren and all other teams is the MCL39’s ability to manage tires in the most difficult conditions. In the rain in Melbourne and Miami, the difference was evident with the Intermediate tires, which tend to overheat as the track dries and the tread becomes smooth. This allowed the orange duo to maintain a far superior pace than everyone else, with zero overheating and, therefore, zero degradation, maintaining unmatched consistency in performance. The same thing happens, unfortunately for others, on dry asphalt as well. “When it’s cold, they win by 10 seconds, when it’s hot, by 30, today even 37,” said George Russell in the post-race interview in Miami. The MCL39 excels on circuits where a perfect balance between slow and fast corners is important and, above all, where tire management is key—such as when rear axle thermal degradation (overheating) is crucial, like in Bahrain and Miami.
Since last season, Red Bull has raised suspicions about potential ‘tricks’ in the wheel corner area. The Milton Keynes engineers requested information from the FIA about the possible use of tiny amounts of water to manage temperatures, a technique they know well, and Rob Marshall believes this could have been brought to Woking. However, neither Pirelli nor the FIA found any evidence to support Horner’s team’s claims. This led to the study of the MCL39’s wheel area with specialized thermal cameras, as reported by AMuS, which showed “a strange temperature profile, certainly very different from ours and even from the other competitors,” a top-level engineer from Milton Keynes revealed. It is no surprise, then, that on both orange cars, the tires are almost always in the perfect operating range, especially avoiding overheating when environmental and track conditions demand it.
The suspicion, now a certainty for all direct competitors, is that the team led by Andrea Stella has found the perfect method through its cooling system to direct air to cool the brakes and also to prevent the tires from overheating too much, thereby ensuring the right temperature to trigger them and guarantee peak grip in a wider temperature window. It is a delicate balance achieved through what Andrea Stella calls the dark art of this F1. “It is clear that in race conditions, when we have to deal with tire wear in hot conditions, our car behaves very well. I would like to emphasize that this is the result of very specific engineering work by our team,” said the engineer from Umbria.
In short, not only in terms of aeroelasticity, but also in the wheel corner area, more precisely inside the brake ducts, McLaren makes a significant difference from all other teams, thanks to very advanced technical solutions developed by Rob Marshall’s team, a former top engineer from Red Bull. The brake ducts we usually see covering the entire braking system have a standard design on the outer part, but beneath it, teams have a lot of freedom in design and often look for significant aerodynamic and cooling gains. For this season, McLaren has significantly raised the technical bar even in this macro-area. It is no coincidence that all three top teams are working extensively in this area to bring developments in the short and medium term. In Milton Keynes, as we have already reported, they are working to replicate what McLaren believes they have done, with sensitive parts that may already see track time at one of the upcoming races, though Verstappen was vague about it in Miami. “We’re doing our best to solve this problem. But some things take more time, even to understand fully. Then producing them is a whole other story.”
Likewise, Mercedes and Ferrari, although the latter has more of an issue with warming up the tires rather than avoiding overheating them, are working on it. In Brackley, they have clearly admitted, through James Allison, the aim of the updates that will arrive in the early part of the summer season. “The main focus we’ve had is to control the tire temperature, a crucial aspect to allow the car to use the pace it has,” said the former Ferrari man, now in charge of the technical office at the Brackley team.
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