McLaren hopes to speed up at the Singapore Grand Prix
The Marina Bay is a low-speed track due to its high-downforce nature, bringing a question to every critic’s mind; how will the top teams perform at the Singapore grand prix this weekend? One of the top running teams, i.e McLaren, have been struggling to
perform at the Hungaroring and Monte Carlo circuits keeping in mind both of these tracks are quite similar to the Marina Bay. This concludes to the fact that the McLaren’s are not suitable for high-downforce tracks and they might struggle at the Singapore
Grand Prix.
As McLaren was struggling at the Hungarian and Italian Grand Prix, their championship rivals Red Bull and Ferrari, dominated both of the tracks and at the Hungaroring, the four drivers from the respective teams finished in the top four positions. Ahead of
Singapore however, McLaren seems confident as they claim that they have solved their high-downforce problems and have closed a considerable amount of gap.
The team is aware that this is a big weekend and they have not been performing up to the mark at the high-downforce tracks this year.
“In Hungary we all recognised the pace wasn’t where we needed to be, and since then we’ve had a whole number of upgrades on the car, some of which we’ve already run at Spa and Monza”, explained principal race engineer Philip Prew, in a Vodafone McLaren Mercedes
'Phone-In' session.
In addition, the team vows that they have installed further upgrades that are, a new front wing and other devices in order to ensure a good performance in Singapore. This will increase the downforce on the car.
“In addition, I think our understanding of the car - how to exploit the car, how to get the downforce to work for us - has improved since Hungary. So we’re optimistic we have closed that gap and hopefully we’ll be competitive”, he added.
Prew was optimistic that the strict bodywork tests carried out by the FIA at the last round in Italy would also affect the pace of the top three teams relatively. It is obvious that it will be very close and Philip thinks that it will be competitive between
Ferrari, Red Bull and McLaren. The changes the teams have made after the legality clarification will influence their performances this weekend. Prew added that the bib end has been tightened up quite considerably as the circuit is quite bumpy and that could
affect the compliance at the bib.
The recent regulations made it clear to everyone that it will be a level playing field and everybody is aware of the constraints they have to operate in. This will have a positive effect on the sport and the teams but the advantage Red Bull and Ferrari gained
at Hungary will be harder to develop for McLaren. Only time can tell if McLaren has done enough to secure a decent car for the race. The team seems optimistic that the gap set by the Formula 1 standards should have reduced.
Both of the drivers in McLaren, Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton have used their seventh new engine and this might possibly be another problem for the team as they are allowed just one more for the rest of the season. Pre however, thinks this is not issue.
He stated that the team is using their race engines exactly the way they planned back in March as the season began. This was always the team’s intention to run new engines at Spa and Monza in order to tune the new engines to the limit, as these are the most
power-sensitive races. The team is not worried about anything regarding the engines as they are running exactly how they planned.
“As for Ferrari using the eighth, I think that will only affect their Friday running, in terms of running used engines. From the information I can gather - gleaned from press releases etc - then sadly I don’t think that will give us any advantage over them
I’m afraid”, said Prew.
It will be interesting to see how the teams perform at the Friday Practice at Marina Bay in order to evaluate what the teams have in store for the coming race.
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