Read time: 15.3 mins

The launch of a new car is a big moment for any team in any year. Fifteen, perhaps 18 months down the line from the initial concept layout, having gone through a project that gradually consumes more and more of the factory’s time and resources, showing the product to the world for the first time is always memorable.

This year, however, the moment is bigger. A wholesale reboot of the technical regulations is refashioning F1 for 2022; a desire for closer racing has required arguably the most comprehensive rewrite of the rules in the history of the sport; certainly, the biggest since the early 1980s. With the consequences of the cost-cap starting to hit hard and taking into account the change in working practises necessitated by Covid-19, this year’s cars are the culmination of projects considerably more complex than anyone in the sport is accustomed to delivering. There’s been a lot going on.

James Key, McLaren F1 Technical Director, talks us through just what makes the MCL36 so very different to its predecessors.

First up James, what has changed?

Everything! There’s nothing carried over from last year, this is a design on a clean sheet of paper. There are a lot of changes – many of which you can’t see from the outside. Looking at the obvious things you can see, the first thing you notice are the new tyres. We’ve had 13-inch rims for many years, with high profile tyres, we’re now on 18-inch rims with low profile tyres. It’s a big change for Pirelli and they’ve done a really thorough job of developing these new tyres over the last couple of years. For us, any tyre change can generate a lot of design influence. Of course, you’ve got to work with a different grip level but also with the way the car balances, how the new tyres affect the handling and so on. We’ve tracked this very closely, as its one of the biggest changes to the regulations we’ve seen in recent years.

The other big step is the aerodynamics, which are fundamentally different. The teams, the FIA and F1 have been through a really good process, attempting to define cars that are still very much F1 cars, still have the level of performance you expect from F1 cars but have the ability to follow each other far more closely, and attempt overtaking without having to wait for a DRS zone.

F1 cars go quick because they generate huge amounts of downforce. The previous regulations have seen cars generate that downforce in ways that are easily disrupted by the wake of the car ahead. The car struggles to follow closely because it loses (aerodynamic) load and balance, and overheats its tyres, making it very difficult to drive.

We’ve been through a thorough process of deriving new aerodynamics. We have a [shaped] floor designed to generate downforce through ground effect, and a lot of areas of bodywork have been greatly simplified, where complex designs that were susceptible to disturbances in [air] flow – such as the myriad devices we previously had on the front of the sidepods and front of the floor – have all gone.

We have a much-simplified front wing. It’s a real monster, absolutely enormous and very powerful – but much-simplified compared to the one it replaced. We’ve got things like spinning wheel covers, which will prevent out-washing airflow, which was a big contributor to a disturbed wake and therefore very bad for a following car, and at the rear we have a massive diffuser and a very different shape to the rear wing.

You mentioned the tyres first and the aero second – do you think the new tyres are going to have a bigger impact than the new aero?

I think aero will be more important – because it always is! It always comes to the top of the list eventually because it’s much more in the hands of the teams. Everyone is going to have the same tyres, so there won’t necessarily be a performance differentiation. I think in terms of tyre management and mechanical grip, there could be a few differences – but the bigger differences will be what you do with the aero.

…having said that, of course the tyre affects aero also. The profile of these tyres always makes an impact on the car aerodynamically and these are significantly different to what we’ve had before. So how the tyres interact with the aerodynamics of the car will be important, as will how the car handles and the impact they have on chassis dynamics – but it won’t be as significant as the difference we see in aerodynamics.

On the subject of chassis dynamics, you mentioned the changes that we can't see. Under the skin, is the MCL36 likewise very different to its predecessors?

Under the skin it’s pretty similar, other than the suspension. Suspension internals have been simplified. We don’t have inertial dampers anymore – that’s all been reimagined as something easier to police, easier to design and ultimately cheaper – we just have springs, dampers, anti-roll bars and so forth.

The mechanical layout has naturally changed as well, as we’re trying to complement the aerodynamic layout of the car. The gearbox, for example, sits right in the diffuser. A gearbox from last year, in terms of its geometry and construction, just wouldn’t match a ’22 car, and so we’ve had to redesign the casing to be much more sympathetic to aerodynamics than it has been in the past. What’s also new for ’22 is that this gearbox will be homologated. As a cost-saving measure, you’ll be stuck with the fundamental design of your gearbox for five years – so there’s been a lot of futureproofing put into the concept as well.

The general consensus seems to be that the new rules are more rigid, the geometry of the car is more prescriptive, and designers have less freedom. Is that the case?

One of the things in the background that you don’t see is that we’re going to be regulated in a different way. The old-school method was to work within ‘legality boxes’ – defined areas of the car within which you could do almost anything you wanted. We’ve now got volumes specified in CAD. It’s a significant change in the way we work because those volumes are heavily prescribed. What you’ll see, for example, is front wings and rear wings being very similar from one team to the next because you have a certain volume within which you can work, and very little room for variation within those geometries.

The area around the front wheels is another good example. The wheel covers, aspects of the brake ducts and the new winglets over the front tyres are all prescribed designs. They will be identical from one car to the next and we haven’t had that before for aerodynamics. Last year, the only prescribed aerodynamic part was the neutral centre section of the front wing.

The idea in making all of these parts near identical from car to car is that it will help with the aerodynamic philosophy of creating a car that is easier to follow.

Alongside the geometric changes, the new technical regs also include provision for more stringent safety standards. Have those been hard to meet?

The safety of the cars has dramatically increased. For very good reason the side-impact requirements of the car and the chassis strength are huge compared to what we’ve had in previous years. Likewise, the front and rear crash structures have more stringent tests, as does the Halo. It’s been a tough engineering challenge because it adds quite a lot of bulk and weight to the chassis and that needs to be refined and tuned just like everything else. It does mean the cars will be heavier – which gets you into a design cycle all of its own: the car is heavier, so it has more energy at a given speed, so your impact structures have to be better, which adds more weight, so the car has more energy and so on. We had to find the happy medium in all of that, but it’s been covered pretty well – it was a lot of R&D work though.

Has building a different sort of car required a different set of skills from the factory? Has creating the MCL36 been like asking Roger Federer to play squash?

I think our version of that would be if the regulations suddenly demanded we build something like a hypercar for Le Mans! But no, it isn’t like that, it’s still very much like creating an F1 car – just a different sort of F1 car. We’ve been designing the aerodynamics of the car with slightly different regs and a slightly different approach, which means there’s nothing carried over from last year’s aerodynamic concept but the basics of what makes a ’22 car react well aerodynamically, desensitises it, gives it good characteristics and good levels of downforce are actually very similar to what we’ve seen in past years – we’re just achieving it in a slightly different way, using the floor more than the other bits.

All the tools we’ve got at our disposal are still suitable for designing a ’22 car. Other than the R&D we’ve had to do specifically for this car, there’s no lack of knowledge or capability or methodology hindering us as we attack this set of regs. I suppose the carryover is the knowledge within the team: the capabilities, the understanding and beliefs around what makes a car go quick. Those are just as valid for ’22 as they were for ’21. Things like stability on the way into a low-speed corner matter just as much as they did before, and we’ll be tackling issues in much the same way as we have in previous years. It’s just a case of transitioning our knowledge across to a new set of regs.

Having the capability and resources to focus on the fine detail was a differentiator between teams in the previous generation of cars. Does a more prescribed geometry change that? Does the cost cap?

I think being more restricted with these regs probably means refinement begins to make a bigger difference. We won’t be able to patch a problem by piling on more downforce in an area we can quickly develop. It’s going to be more subtle than that and, in this respect, having the ability to research everything very thoroughly or look at lots of different alternatives would still make a difference.

Obviously with the cost-cap, that ability is going to be a lot more even between teams. It used to be based on money, in terms of the number of people you had, how much you could invest in your facilities, your tools, their accuracy and correlation. We’re constrained now by having a ceiling on how much can be spent. Clearly, we have to pick our battles very carefully and hope they’re the right ones.

The distinction will still be there because, although we have the cost cap, there is still a legacy of knowledge and in the methodologies that will carry forward. Pre-cap, the teams less constrained by budgetary pressure were able to invest in squeezing everything out of their simulations, their wind tunnels and so on. That will still allow them to go into levels of detail other teams cannot, so the advantage isn’t simply going to disappear in 2022… though it should be less evident by 2024-’25.

Before Covid-19 stuck, this car was slated to appear in 2021, and would have been our first Mercedes-powered car for quite a while. Has the MCL36 gained from having a year to run the Mercedes PU in the MCL35M?

It’s helped splitting the introduction of the new car and introduction of the new powertrain into two separate seasons. Installation of the Mercedes PU was quite different to the previous power unit we had, and required a lot of fresh thinking to accommodate it. Doing that with set of familiar regs, and with a lot of homologation between ’20 and ’21 meant we could tackle all the challenges of getting a new power unit into our car without having to worry about the wider picture and the implications it could have on an unfamiliar set of regs.

It probably worked against us a little bit for ’21 but that’s history now and we’re definitely benefitting from having been through that process, effectively a year early, getting great support from our colleagues at Mercedes and building up an excellent working relationship with them. This year is a much bigger project – but we get to do it using a power unit with which we are familiar. Doing both things at the same time would have been… difficult.

The added complication with the MCL36 is that, once again, it's been designed around the obligations of working safely during a pandemic. Have restrictions affected the development of the car?

In some cases, there’s been a lot of working from home as Covid has ebbed and flowed, which of course is different to how we’ve designed cars in previous years, and certainly quite challenging – but everyone has risen to the challenge. I’d like to say an enormous thank you to the whole team for the efforts they’ve made, and the way everyone has collaborated on a very complex project. The technical and production process has been extremely collaborative and there’s been an enormous amount of work done, often under a lot of pressure. We could push that engineering process very late and try and optimise the car for longer because of hard work by production and procurement to deal with later deadlines, and in car build to put the car together in a very short timescale. That allowed us to have a complete car at launch; it’s down to every single member of the team and great to see.

Finally, whenever F1 hits the reset button, there's always the thought that someone might have the decisive, clever idea everyone else missed. What are your thoughts going into winter testing – is it exhilarating or terrifying?

Definitely not terrifying – absolutely looking forward to running the car. Fundamentally, it’s always great to see the new car hit the track. There’s going to be challenges, there’s going to be problems to deal with because there always are – but we’ve put two years into the MCL36 and it’ll be fantastic seeing it turning wheels and running.

…of course the first qualifying session in Bahrain, when you really find out how quick everyone is, that’s always a bit scary!

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