McLaren has brought a new floor to the Mexico City Grand Prix as one of the few performance upgrades being introduced by teams in the middle of the U.S.-Mexico-Brazil tripleheader.
Most teams brought new packages to the United States Grand Prix a week ago to get full value across the final six races, but a new McLaren floor has only been prepared in time for this weekend. The team has just one of the floors available and it will be run by Lando Norris from FP2 onwards, with Pato O’Ward driving his car without the update in the first practice session.
“The floor design has been heavily revised, with geometric changes in all areas, resulting in an increase of aerodynamic load across all conditions,” McLaren states.
RB is the only other team with a performance upgrade submitted to the FIA, with updates to the floor fences and floor edge. The fences change reduces losses elsewhere on the car, while the revised edge will deliver increased load. There are also enlarged cooling outlets on the engine cover and cooling louvers in circuit-specific changes that are seen across the grid.
Red Bull has a bigger central topbody on its engine cover that allows for more power unit cooling, as well as enlarged front brake ducts, while Ferrari has added extra cooling louvers to its bodywork. McLaren also has more cooling louvers and sidepod and engine cover cooling options on top of its floor update.
As well as larger bodywork for the engine cover, Williams will be testing a new beam wing that it believes will provide a better drag range in Mexico City. The altitude means teams run high-downforce packages but get far less performance from them, akin to getting Monza-spec downforce from a Monaco-spec package.
Mercedes, Aston Martin, Alpine, Stake and Haas have not submitted any new parts for this weekend’s race.