McLaren news for Monza
The Monza track might not be the most suitable to highlight the qualities of McLaren. Despite coming off the last two consecutive wins between Budapest and Zandvoort, circuits that clearly have quite different characteristics from the Temple of Speed, the real problem for the MCL40 could lie in the ability to generate downforce with the body of the car: a drag that is a formidable weapon on technical tracks, but a potential boomerang on those with long straights like the historic venue of the Italian GP in Formula 1. A challenge to which the Woking team tries to respond with a few more small aerodynamic updates and a highly anticipated novelty: the inverted movable rear wing called “Macarena”.
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Lando Norris recently explained how McLaren’s performance difficulties mainly show up when facing slow and tight corners, which should reassure the papaya team’s fans on a weekend like Monza. However, the English team itself puts some caveats forward in the weekend’s press preview, explaining how the MCL40 “might not be the fastest overall this weekend” while maintaining the ambition to “build on the recent positive momentum and try to make the most of every opportunity to bring home important points for the standings”.
The new “Macarena” wing arrives
To do this, McLaren will also rely on some aerodynamic novelties explicitly designed for the practically unique characteristics of the Monza circuit, but also on some parts that have already actually debuted on track in the past, although not then used in the race. This explicitly concerns the new Macarena wing which makes the English team the third on the grid, after Ferrari and Red Bull , to explore the inverted movable rear wing to reduce drag: a solution we have already seen tested (with a functioning still different from the two rival teams) in FP1 of the Hungarian GP and which then went into the drawer waiting for Monza.
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The chosen name for the inverted wing (remembering 2010)
Forget the term “Macarena”, coined jokingly by Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur at the start of the season and then remained in the collective imagination because it is particularly evocative of the movement of the movable flap. The new McLaren rear wing is in fact renamed H-Wing (“Ala H”, in Italian) to recall the ingenious F-Duct designed by Woking engineers in 2010: just as the “F duct” took its name because the opening was near a point on the livery where the letter F of the then sponsor (Vodafone) was printed, in this case it is emphasized how the actuator that operates the system is located at the “H” of the Etihad sponsor on the rear wing. Beyond the names, certainly one more solution to fuel Lando Norris’s comeback dreams, even on a track theoretically not so favorable for McLaren.
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