Since the start of the season, McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella has frequently detailed how a customer team is at a disadvantage to the works outfit of a power unit supplier.
It’s entirely logical that, given its close relationship with its sister High Performance Powertrains division, the Mercedes team has enjoyed an advantage in terms of information and understanding how to get the most out of the hybrid V6 from the start of each race weekend.
However, in Spa Stella revealed that McLaren have finally been able to run PU simulation tools available to Mercedes – and that the benefits are already being seen.
His revelation came in the context of a discussion about the importance of optimising deployment around Spa, and the disparity in performance between Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri that was evident over the weekend.
“Certainly this is an important topic,” he said. “When you come to a circuit like this, which is inherently highly power sensitive, and then you have such an energy starvation, then this concept of the sensitivities that we’ve been talking about right from the start – sensitivity to driving input, sensitivity to how much you deploy before a certain corner – here they were, if anything, even more visible.
“And across team mates, if I compare Lando and Oscar in their best lap in Q3, Oscar is losing time in the final straight and Blanchimont, for reasons that had nothing to do with Oscar’s driving.
“They are just a minor deviation in how the power unit was operated, and I think this seems to be pretty much the same across the two Mercedes cars. When you overlay Antonelli and Russell, it looks like Lando and Oscar.”
He continued: “We do so much work as a team at the simulator, in offline simulation, and now as a customer team, we are finally getting the tools – and we are what, race 10? We are finally getting the tools to actually simulate before the event, so there’s a lot of work that goes into preparation.
“But then, anyhow, you do the first lap, and you see that things don’t go as you anticipate. Then you start to adapt and react.
“So I would say that most of the conversations this weekend have been about power unit and optimisation, but it’s not like it’s only works team to customer team, because like I said before, it looks like there are deviations even for the works team between one driver and the other.”
While Stella may have had frustrations at Silverstone that the team didn’t receive the latest spec power unit, he downplayed the delay in getting the relevant simulation tools from HPP.
“When you operate a power unit that is so complicated – and this is complicated because of the regulations, not because the HPP is particularly complicated, it’s the same for everyone and is inherent in the regulations – you need models of the power unit itself to be able to test different parameters, and see how the power unit would respond.
“But also to optimise – optimise the deployment, optimise the driving, and optimise the gears, for instance, and so on.
“And I think I’ve been clear right from the start of the season that we were a bit on the back foot in terms of having this availability.
“This has never been a point whereby we created any sort of controversy or polemic with HPP. We know that they’ve been pushing very hard. They were certainly very busy, and one of the elements that somehow created some shortcomings is the fact that some of these tools were not available just because of a timeline.
“So we worked together to make sure that they had become available as soon as possible. And as a matter of fact, now they are starting to be available, and we are definitely taking great benefit.”
That was perhaps reflected in the fact that Norris was near the top of the times all weekend – second on Friday and in FP3, and then P1, P3 and P3 through the three Qualifying sessions, despite a mistake on his final run.
Unfortunately he now drops down to P13 on the grid – however in typical glass half-full fashion Stella has no regrets about taking a PU penalty here.
“I have to say that throughout the weekend, when I saw Lando like P2 in every practice session or something like that, I was thinking to myself, yeah, the penalty is a bit in the way at this circuit,” he said.
“But at the same time I was responding to myself that there’s many more races to go. It’s important that we have this new component in the pool.
“Really, we can’t go without this penalty, so we have to accept it, and this improved performance is just a good indication for the races to come.
“And if we think about more objectively rather than subjectively, at the fact that as of Hungary we will start bringing some upgrades to the car and we will bring some upgrades for a few races, then we want to be in good shape there.
“Let’s take this performance here in Spa as a good indication that some more performant weekends are ahead of us.”
