McLaren’s anticipated updated MCL33, featuring a radical front-end upgrade as well as other tweaks, has finally been revealed, having been hidden by the team throughout Thursday setup.
The updated nose section was presented in the pit lane on Thursday evening at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, as the team took the car to scrutineering. The car had been due to run in this spec for the season opener in Barcelona, but the team missed their own deadline, meaning that they put together a more comprehensive upgrade package for this race, the first European round.
While Fernando Alonso believes that the package won’t be a ‘magic bullet’ to the front, teammate Stoffel Vandoorne reckons it’ll take a little while to figure out the new spec’s performance level:
“There’ll be quite a few things on the car that’ll obviously be visible from the outside the car will look quite a bit different. [This] is always a race where everyone brings updates to the car so that’s not a surprise.
“We’ll have to wait and see exactly what it’ll bring to the car, but it is definitely a good opportunity for us to bring a few parts. We will bring a few parts to the next couple of races as well so it’s not only here we’re bringing parts.
“Tomorrow will be a busy day figuring out what the best configurations are, what we have to learn about those parts, we’ll see.”
The team will try out the new upgrade package for the first time during Friday’s FP1 session.
El nuevo morro del McLaren. Espectacular pic.twitter.com/m7lN7Sl4DW
— Albert Fabrega (@AlbertFabrega) May 10, 2018
