McLaren had a surprise unveiling of the MCL39 at Silverstone, sporting a Camo livery before the F175 event in London.
Teams that wanted to do a launch before this February 18th event were forced to use a one-off livery. McLaren and Williams both made their 2025 debuts with one-off colours, whilst RB rescheduled their filming day.
Haas took a big risk, attempting to do a private filming day – though images eventually leaked.
McLaren MCL39: A totally overhauled car to achieve efficiency gains
Last season, McLaren wee the best car on the higher downforce circuits, such as Hungary and Holland. They had a big advantage over its competitors.
“With the high downforce package we seem to be very competitive. Hungary was a relatively dominant win, like Zandvoort and Singapore,” McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella admitted.
The other cars, Ferrari first and foremost, were much closer on other types of circuits. The SF-24 was a particular handful on low downforce circuits such as Monza – and street circuits like Baku.
“If we look at the low downforce, we know we have a few more problems.
“But as we saw in Spa and Monza, we have made some steps forward, ” Andrea Stella has said in recent months.
Progress was also made in a rather aggressive manner, regulation in hand, if we think about the mini-DRS that made the MCL38 particularly high-performing on low-load circuits. The papaya team regressed in this area, as seen in Las Vegas, when this trick was banned.
With their 2025 project, McLaren’s goal is to have excellent efficiency from the MCL39 on all levels of aerodynamic load.
“The main focus of the 2025 project was on aerodynamic efficiency,” said Andrea Stella.
This involved radical revisions, reducing the volumed of key components – giving aerodynamicists greater freedom to exploit desired advantages.
The McLaren MCL39 is Rob Marshall’s first real car
At first glance, the 2025 McLaren doesn’t look too different from last year’s MCL38. However, as to be expected in the final year of technical regulations, it’s clear that the devil is in the details.
McLaren’s aerodynamicists have more performance to exploit thanks to their new chassis. Cooling and other areas have been redesigned in the modified central area of the MCL39.
This is largely thanks to Rob Marshall. The MCL39 is the first McLaren fully under his supervision, having joined from Red Bull in January 2024 – when last year’s car was in the late stages of development.
McLaren does not appear to have taken a leap into the unknown like Red Bull with the RB20 and its ‘unique’ cooling. Still, in some areas, such as the front suspension, it has gone to the extremes of some concepts. If not refined, these could be counter-productive.
“We were very careful in thinking about the 2025 car because the MCL38 was already a competitive car. Therefore, we had to carefully consider how far we wanted to go with innovation.
“In the end, we decided to take a relatively ambitious approach to make significant progress,” said Andrea Stella.
According to the McLaren team principal, the MCL39 is a step forward equivalent to all of last season’s upgrades – so approximately half a second.
This figure should not be too surprising – other teams will aim to replicate these gains.
McLaren’s engineers have worked to extract every thousandth and aerodynamic opportunity from the MCL39. Overall, this should lead to good progress, even in the last year of regulations.
This also includes the front suspension, which at first glance would appears to have accentuated the anti-dive.
However, speaking to an engineer from a competing team, this alteration is much less significant than the changes to the upper triangle – since the lower triangle has also undergone an overall inclination on its axis.
This modification should be intended for a mainly aerodynamic gain, rather than a mechanical one. The aim is to further increase the downwash effect and maximise the flow towards the entrance of the Venturi channels.
