The Race

Gary Anderson: The McLaren launch element I found most convincing

Added 2025-02-13 20:01:30 +0000 UTC

In an exclusive bonus column for The Race Members' Club on Patreon, Gary Anderson highlights an element of McLaren's 2025 F1 car launch day that made him most convinced this is a team on the right track.

When you’re designing and developing a Formula 1 car, you’ve got to identify and understand your shortcomings – and understand the strengths you already have - before you make concept changes for your new machine.

If not, you’re simply doing it blindly and risk confusing everyone. That’s when politics takes over and everyone starts pointing the finger.

What I liked about what McLaren team principal Andrea Stella says about the McLaren MCL39 is that he talks about it like I would. By that, I don’t mean he’s doing everything that I would do, but that it shows the team understands what it needs to focus on with its new car.

You might think that what a team boss, even one with an engineering background like Stella, says at a launch doesn’t mean anything. Sometimes, it doesn’t, but when he talks about innovation, the need to raise the bar in all areas of the layout of the car and the importance of creating more opportunity with the packaging it makes sense to me.

A new car is a chance to eliminate limitations that held you back with previous cars, so if you can create some space with chassis or transmission modifications for example. Then the aerodynamicists can take advantage of that to add performance.

That’s why I like what Stella says because this is exactly what any good technical team should try to do in F1. And believe me, from experience this isn’t what always happens. What we saw last year, winning the constructors’ championship, proves that McLaren can do this and I like the way it’s going about building on that.