McLaren SHOULD have taken Hungarian GP pole reveals GPFans' F1 aero analyst

McLaren

McLaren SHOULD have taken Hungarian GP pole reveals GPFans' F1 aero analyst

McLaren are once again showing red hot pace in Budapest

Shubham Sangodkar

Saturday 22 July 2023 21:12

The last two races have seen an upsurge from McLaren, coming off the bench after the first eight races of the season.

While both the Austrian GP and the British GP results were on merit, both the tracks are heavily dominated by medium-speed and high-speed sections which lead to most of the gurus and even the drivers resorting to say that their performance was track specific.

Well, guess what, it's not! If you are a McLaren fan, today's qualifying results showed that you can finally be excited.

Hungaroring

The Hungarian track is very different from both Silverstone and Spielberg. It's dominated mostly by slow-speed sections with long radius corners. This also makes it very sensitive to driver inputs and to the wind. Therefore, at this track slow-speed performance is definitely tested but also the car drivability is tested too.

Mercedes as a reference for slow-speed corners

The Mercedes from our analysis was the fastest car in the slow-speed corners for the last few races, so we expected them to do well in Hungary. So if we compare the McLaren and the Mercedes in the slow speed sections we should get a good calibration if they have taken a step in performance.

Norris vs Hamilton

The plots below is the telemetry analysis between Hamilton and Norris.

Article continues under video

From the data, we can see that Norris is able to keep up with Hamilton around the slow-speed sections losing only about 0.1-0.2 sec around the entire lap which is very impressive considering how far back they were in slow-speed performance just two races ago before the upgrades. Norris makes up most of that time at T4 and T11 in the high-speed sections leaving only 0.082 sec of a difference between them.

Interestingly, Norris has a small correction on the throttle that he makes at T6-7, because of which he losses about two-tenths to Hamilton, chances are he would have been on the pole without that mistake !!

What’s next?

This really shapes up the picture for McLaren as now they are competitive around slow-speed circuits as well. Their long-run pace on Friday looked even more impressive than Mercedes, who seemed to have been struggling with tyre degradation. I’d expect Norris to challenge for a genuine podium in the race as well.

Shubham Sangodkar is a former F1 Aerodynamicist with a Master's in Racing Car Design specialising in F1 Aerodynamics and F1 Data Analysis. He also posts aerodynamics content on his YouTube channel, which can be found here.