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Post by wilmywood8455 on Feb 15, 2024 13:20:07 GMT -8
McLaren’s new MCL38 – the first car to be developed in the team’s new on-site wind tunnel – follows the development direction seen with the major upgrades of last year’s car. But this time there are some fundamental physical hard points rearranged to further exploit that direction. Last year’s Austria upgrades – which completely reworked the front of the sidepod for a bigger undercut and greater separation of the radiator inlet from the lower part of the sidepod front – transformed the competitiveness of the car. With the new MCL38, that sidepod has been quite radically reworked, with the upper side impact bar now exposed (a Mercedes innovation from 2022) and used aerodynamically in conjunction with an enhanced lip on the radiator inlet to accelerate the flow along the top of the sidepod. As with all this generation of car, changes in the sidepod geometry are just the visible manifestation of the efforts to enhance the airflow through the underbody, which is where the bulk of performance improvement potential resides.
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