McLaren simply did not have time to work on low-drag rear-wings for the Belgian Grand Prix after its huge Formula 1 upgrade, boss Andrea Stella has explained.
At Spa-Francorchamps, the MCL60s of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri ran high-downforce rear-wings, which propelled Piastri to second place in the Sprint race.
However, this was run in wet conditions, with the high downforce package suiting the conditions, but when it dried for race day, the McLarens were vulnerable.
Piastri retired on the first lap after contact, but Norris was swamped in the opening laps as the low top speed held him back through Sectors 1 and 3 of Spa, with Stella conceding McLaren's focus had been on the huge upgrades applied to the car across the Austrian and British Grands Prix that transformed the car.
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Stella's hindsight
"In perfect hindsight, we could have tried to find some other solution to reduce the drag on the car," Stella told media including RacingNews365.
"We know how much efficiency we would have shed, we would have removed off the car, but it could be that we wouldn't have been able to achieve [the Sprint results] if we had made this choice.
"Obviously for a dry race, you do want to race with less drag.
"I don't think that there is a correlation between the fact that we were focused on the upgrades and the decisions that you make on set-up once we arrived at Spa.
"The real correlation is the fact that because we were busy working on other things, we didn't have the time to work on low-drag rear wings.
"That is the real correlation, and the rest is not correlated with the fact that we were busy in developing the car.
"We were expecting the vulnerability, but when we were in the mix with other cars, it was starting to spiral negatively quite rapidly.
"We have to very frankly admit that while this configuration gave us an advantage [on Friday and Saturday], it was a significant issue in the race.
"We didn't help ourselves by trying to give Lando free air and fitting Hard tyres, although as a counterpart because we had enough downforce in the middle sector, that is why we were able to extend the stint on the Soft tyre so long and retain competitiveness even when the rubber was almost finished.
"It is not like we necessarily wanted to target this configuration, fixing the efficiency of the car at low drag is on the to-do list, but it was lower than some other priorities that we have worked on in the previous months."
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