On February 11th, McLaren will officially enter the 2022 F1 season. The appointment will see the unveiling of the new car, the MCL36, with which the Woking team hopes to improve, even more, the progress already highlighted last season.

According to the team, the new MCL36 could be the car that required the most effort in the team's history to be built, in a critical season by definition, due to the new technical regulations, a cost cap that limits teams in many development areas and requires more mental and creative effort, and in a still tragic world situation caused by the ongoing Covid pandemic.

McLaren Operations Director, Piers Thynne, explicated this particular development condition of the new car in an interview reported on the team's official website.

Thynne described about how January and February are usually the toughest months in terms of production, but explained that even in today's Formula 1 conditions, teamwork can help overcome any difficulties:

“What we see across the MTC is fantastic teamwork, good communication and good collaboration. That unlocks the complexity of the task that we’re working through, which is to deliver a wholly new car to a wholly new set of regulations.

“Most years we would be using – or at least modifying – parts from the previous car, but that’s not the case with the MCL36. It’s all new – and obviously, that puts significant pressure on our resources, and strain on our supply chain as well – we’re feeling a little indigestion in some of our key projects,” he added.

“Building the MCL36 to the new regulations is a significant burden, but it is perhaps more the cultural change of doing some things in a different way, but If it’s all going smoothly, you’re not trying hard enough.”

Compared to previous seasons, this year, the team decided to follow a more qualitative approach, avoiding manufacturing many new pieces to be tested during the pre-season testing.

The purpose is to not only to maximize the work in the factory, avoiding unnecessary waste of components, but also to respect the cost limits imposed by the budget cap.

“Something we are working on is making production as lean is it can be. We’re manufacturing fewer [spare] parts.

“It’s a difficult trade to make but we will have smaller quantities of parts available for the ’36 than we had for the ’35M, to have room in the budget to deliver more performance. We’re not going to ever have too few parts to run the cars, we’ll always protect that, but every pound counts and we’ve got to make sure we’re spending wisely.”

Following this philosophy, McLaren decided to bring a basic version of the MCL36 both in Barcelona and Sakhir and to get on track with the definitive version of the car only in the first race weekend in Bahrain.

“We know performance at race one is critical, and we’ll be delivering an upgrade package to that event, but we expect much more to follow,”

“One of the reasons we’re being lean on stock is that we know we want to evolve the car. There are no prizes for having six floors and six front wings at the first race.

“We’ll be taking some subtly different approaches this year to make sure production capacity is available and can respond to aerodynamic evolution. That will be key to success this year,” McLaren's Operations Director concluded.

New technical regulations, a cost-cap and covid-19 mean building the MCL36 is not business as usual, but that hasn't stalled its progress. 👊

Hear the latest on how the MCL36 car build is taking shape. 👇

— McLaren (@McLarenF1) February 2, 2022