McLaren eyes Red Bull RB22 breakthrough after Verstappen resurgence

McLaren is already studying Red Bull’s radical new sidepods after Max Verstappen’s Miami Grand Prix resurgence hinted the upgrade may have closed the gap to Mercedes.

Formula 1 entered a new technical era this season, as the sport dropped the ground-effect aerodynamic concept in favour of overbody aerodynamics, with movable front and rear wings.

McLaren studying Red Bull sidepods after Miami upgrade

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It has led to a raft of different solutions, from Ferrari’s Macarena rear wing to Mercedes’ front wing, and now Red Bull’s sidepods.

Red Bull introduced significant sidepod upgrades in Miami, adopting a redesigned upper profile with a pronounced air duct. The upgrade was aimed at improving air flow, downforce and heat distribution.

The extreme design caught the eye as it differed from every one of Red Bull’s rivals.

McLaren definitely noticed it.

With this year’s new cars in their infancy, Stella believes there will come a point of convergence, as happened in the ground-effect era. That, though, is still a long way off.

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“For those who are technically interested, we are in a very, very interesting phase,” the team principal told PlanetF1.com and other media outlets in Miami.

“It is very interesting because if you see the sidepod concept that Red Bull introduced, it is quite different to the sidepod concept that, for instance, Mercedes and Ferrari have adopted, and the McLaren style is further different.

“I think there will be a stabilisation at some stage, a convergence, but we look like we are quite far from this convergence.

“So I think there will be a process of looking at each other, testing things, and certainly each team will be testing, taking a look at the Red Bull concept to see the advantages.

“They have been quite smart and innovative in the way they have used some legality concessions to introduce such geometry.

“I think the overall designs of the cars are far from converging.

“This doesn’t mean that some things have already started to look like: ‘Oh, that is the direction everyone has taken’, but with the 2025 cars, after a few years of the regulations, they started to look very similar to each other.

“I think we are still far from these conditions.”

Red Bull made inroads with the new sidepods, one of seven different parts it introduced in Miami, as Verstappen qualified a season-high P2 where he was only 0.16s off the pace of pole-sitter Kimi Antonelli. Before Miami, his best qualifying was eight-tenths off the pace.

Red Bull, though, wasn’t the only team to make gains as McLaren, also introducing seven new parts, clinched the 1-2 in the Sprint before coming home second and third behind Antonelli in the grand prix.

Asked about the competitive picture, Stella said while McLaren had made inroads, Mercedes was still a few tenths ahead.

“I think because of the upgrades that a large number of teams have delivered here in Miami, we have seen some changes to the competitive picture,” he explained. “Definitely, we have seen a McLaren, Ferrari, and Red Bull closing the gap.

“I think over a single lap, execution is important. We saw McLaren prevailing in the Sprint quali, but kind of the same car was P4 on the grid in the quali. And I think this has to do very much with execution, optimisation and adaptation.

“I think Mercedes, they still possesses a couple of tenths advantage on anybody else.

“I think this was the most noticeable in the race and yesterday [grand prix quali]. I think in the first Sprint section of the weekend for some reason, Mercedes, they didn’t express their full potential, and it looked like the other people made bigger than expected upgrades. But in reality, it was just Mercedes not optimising their potential.

“I think what we have seen is that in the race, if anything, McLaren seemed to have retained from last year the characteristic of being consistent on the tyres, probably a little bit more than some of our competitors, while the main advantage of Mercedes on us is pure pace. The car is just a couple of times faster than our car.

“So this means that when things are so close, and when you have four teams in such a tight competition, execution, adaptation, optimisation, they can become the decisive factor.

“And while we have had a very positive weekend, I think in the race, we might have lost the possibility to win it again for a matter of execution and optimisation of what was available. We were fighting a faster car than us, but perhaps if we had kept Lando in the lead, we could’ve led it to the finish.”

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

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