A temporary solution for the brakes of the MCL36

Alone at the controls during the Bahrain tests, Lando Norris faced some failures with the front brakes of the MCL36, depriving him of valuable track time.

The differences in conditions between Barcelona and Bahrain did not please McLaren. While they had no trouble driving on the Catalan circuit, the heat and strong wind in Bahrain caused some issues for the team. And although McLaren tried to solve the problem by bringing in parts directly from the factory, Lando Norris only managed to complete about thirty additional laps before the brakes decided to do their own thing.

This limited productivity is due to a very quick overheating of the front brakes, a phenomenon that engineers have tried to solve by proposing a temporary solution.

McLaren’s reaction

The team principal of the team, Andreas Seidl, explains this solution. Obviously, the brake ducts are quite complex parts if you look at the whole of Formula 1, Seidl emphasizes. It was therefore a race against the clock to bring, what I would call a temporary solution. It is definitely not the ideal final solution. But we did what we could. The factory was working at full capacity these past seven/eight days to provide us with the solutions that we now have on the car, which we are evaluating during FP1 and FP2, concludes the German.

« Fortunately, this allows us to return to a normal driving pace, and then we can regain our true pace that we lost a little during the last test. And then we’ll see. I think the most important thing [in Bahrain] was to quickly understand where the problem was coming from. I think we found that quite quickly with the team. Now we need to fix it. » says the former engineer, continuing.

« As I said before, we now have a temporary solution. We have provided the car with what was possible within the given time frame, and I am confident that we are moving forward and that the matter is closed with the parts we have now. We still need to assess our capabilities when we go for a drive with this temporary solution, so it is still too early to judge.

» he expressed concerns about the potential loss of performance of the MCL36 with these parts.

The temporary solution.

In short, the new regulations have imposed an increase in the diameter of the brake discs (from 278 mm to 330 mm) while the drilling holes must adhere to a minimum standard of 3 mm. These rules, combined with the new 18-inch rims, have given teams fewer options for heat dissipation during braking. While McLaren has chosen to enclose its brake discs in a casing, it had to install a metal disc protection, replacing the previous carbon fiber one. By doing so, this solution alters the heat transfer between the brakes, tires, and rims.