“The surprise we’ll see is McLaren’s possible progress during the next two months. Just in terms of the speed of the car, they will probably challenge Red Bull.” If someone had said this two months ago, it wouldn’t have sounded absurd. The thing is, former McLaren driver Mika Hakkinen said this at the beginning of the season. Everyone’s reaction to this? Pure disbelief. Hakkinen had people laughing at his expense. But guess who’s laughing now? Hakkinen, McLaren, and of course, its drivers Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris. From the looks of it, things are only going to get better.

The Papaya team went from nowhere to becoming Red Bull’s closest challenger this season. It did it during the season. How remarkable is that? Considering how big a step McLaren was able to take in just a few months, imagine what it can do over more than half a year. Can the Woking squad topple Red Bull in 2024?

Oscar Piastri & Co. are on the right path to catch Red Bull

A part of the reason Hakkinen said what he said was because he believed in McLaren. He knew what the team was capable of. Part of the reason Oscar Piastri ditched Alpine for McLaren was that as well. Despite getting off to a slow start, the Aussie rookie has only seen positive signs recently. As reported by Motorsport Week, he said, “I think the most encouraging thing has been that everything we’ve wanted to put on the car, or everything we’ve wanted to change with the car, has done what it’s supposed to.”

As Piastri said, McLaren’s upgrades have worked exactly how it wanted them to. Every time they introduced an update, it saw an upturn in performance. Seeing the progress McLaren has made this year, F1 expert Peter Windsor gave his take on the team’s chances in 2024. When asked if McLaren will maintain its form in 2024, Windsor replied, “I think they will because the regulations aren’t changing. I’m not saying they’ve got the building blocks that Red Bull has got in order to be able to know exactly where to go next with the car. But they’ve got a better feel for what to do with the car and where to go with the car than any team apart from Red Bull.”

McLaren didn’t have the best of starts its season in 2021, 2022, or 2023. But because of how well it’s understood its car, Windsor believes it’ll start 2024 on the right foot. “I think they will be good from the start of next year. And I think they will be a potential major threat to Red Bull. Right now, it’s inconceivable that anybody at Red Bull is not thinking, ‘McLaren could be a potential threat to us next year.’” 

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Windsor and Piastri aren’t the only people who are feeling confident about the Papaya team’s chances in 2024. Team Principal Andrea Stella had similar things to say about McLaren’s progress and development.

McLaren has the liberty to feel confident

Just about a month ago, McLaren commissioned a new wind tunnel in the McLaren Technology Centre. Before the wind tunnel was built, the Woking outfit was using Toyota’s tunnel in Cologne, Germany. The upgrades McLaren has introduced this season were developed in Germany, and seeing how successful they’ve been and how high the correlation between the simulations and the physical upgrades was, Andrea Stella is confident about the development of their 2024 challenger. Especially now with the in-house wind tunnel.

A few days ago, Stella revealed McLaren started working on its 2024 challenger in July. That was when McLaren saw the positive results of its upgrades for the MCL60. With 2024’s car being developed exclusively in the MTC, Stella gave an update on the progress. He said, “The early runs in the new MTC wind tunnel, with the new car, have been encouraging in terms of correlation with our Computational Fluid Dynamics expectation. And also with what we could see with some models that we used as a test in both environments, to see how well they were correlating. Even in this case, we found good results. So I think we are in a good place.”

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What do you think? Can Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris challenge Red Bull next season?