How McLaren’s new upgrades aim to solve Lando Norris’ discomfort

McLaren technical director Neil Houldey has explained the thinking behind McLaren’s new suspension upgrades.

McLaren’s MCL39 boasts revised front suspension fairings and a new rear suspension geometry, as the Woking-based squad rolled out upgrades for the Austrian Grand Prix.

Neil Houldey: Rear suspension changes aimed at stability

Speaking to the media upon the reveal of the updated McLaren in the pit lane at the Red Bull Ring, McLaren’s technical director of engineering Neil Houldey spoke about the changes made to the MCL39.

“I’m not going to go into too much detail, but you’ll have seen, up and down the grid, that there have been a number of changes on the rear suspension of the cars so, really, suspension kinematics,” he told media, including PlanetF1.com.

“This event, we’ve just added something that we think will add a little bit more stability to the rear end, mainly in corner entry. It’s just an area of development, when aerodynamics become very difficult to gain performance from that, we’ve been involved with and are continuing to evolve the performance of the car.”

All the upgrades are being made available to both Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris, with Houldey confirming that the plan is to run “everything, eventually” on both cars, with McLaren achieving the aim of keeping the two cars at a very similar level.

In Canada, Norris and Piastri ran differing front suspension geometries, with the Australian sticking with the spec from previous races, but Houldey said the expectation is that both drivers will plump for the updates.

“If the analysis shows that it’s quicker, and his preference is that, then we can stick with what we’ve got, or we can upgrade the car,” he said.

“It just depends on what data we get from the sessions, but our expectation is that we’re taking our performance upgrades forward.”

The reason Norris chose the updated suspension in Canada was due to complaints from the British driver about feeling some numbness from the front axle, something which hasn’t affected him in previous years, and Houldey said Norris’ discomfort is being addressed.

“It’s just about being able, for him, to be able to feel the tyres on the limit a little bit better,” he explained.

“So we’ve just made some small kinematic adjustments that we know will be better. They had some small negatives that we didn’t necessarily want to introduce at the start of the year.

“Running earlier on in the season gave us confidence that, actually, that wasn’t going to be a problem. So we were able to introduce this change without any real concern that it wouldn’t be any worse and should be better.

“With all of these things, we are trying to find the best of a number of different scenarios, and it was the same with the suspension. We were concerned in one area, we worked out that wasn’t a concern during the season, and you are just trading things to try and find the most optimum performance, which for Lando, we think we’ve now found.

“There’s obviously a lot more detail that we get in the debriefs from Lando, I think we’ve got an understanding of what he needs to improve the car, and some of the upgrades that we’ve got have been biased towards his comments.

“As you’d expect, you’re trying to work out what the drivers need, and you tailor your upgrades to suit them, but I think no, we’ve got a good understanding of what he does need, and we’re able to make small improvements in a number of areas that will and have helped him over the last few races, and will continue to help him moving forward.”

Asked whether Norris is feeling increased response from the changes made to the front axle, Houldey said the changes in Canada had been trialled to gauge his feel behind the wheel and, with no performance hit, have stuck with the development.

“There’s an upgrade here that’s aerodynamic and there was a mechanical change at the last event that ended up with a small aerodynamic change that we did to get Lando’s feedback on,” he said.

“That feedback, we weren’t expecting a big difference in performance. We were expecting it to be better, and it was only just checking that Lando had no negative points about that change that meant that we’ve taken that forward.”

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