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McLaren unveils new car livery for 2022 season (photos)
The McLaren Formula 1 team unveiled the single-seater, named MCL36, on Friday, which Briton Lando Norris and Australian Daniel Ricciardo will drive in 2022, a season with brand new technical regulations.
After Haas, Red Bull and Aston Martin, McLaren is the fourth team to present its 2022 car, in a video posted online. The colors of the new McLaren remain predominantly orange, with bands of a sky bluer color than last year.
F1 is introducing new regulations this season to allow cars, with modified aerodynamics, to follow and overtake each other more easily, promising more spectacle.
During these traditional pre-season presentations, the teams more or less play the game by revealing (or not) their developments found during the winter.
Thus, Red Bull was content to show an exhibition model which will have little to do with the car that world champion Max Verstappen will drive from the first pre-season tests in Barcelona (February 23-25 ).
McLaren, like Aston Martin, presented its own interpretation, which emerges from the demonstration model presented in 2021 by the International Automobile Federation, regulator of the discipline.
“We are only just beginning to exploit the performance of this regulation“, explained James Key, technical director of McLaren, “and one of the key features of the season will be the intense development war that teams wage once morest each other to assess each other’s performance“.
According to Key, another key will be to find “new ways to generate downforce through ground effect“, which sticks the cars to the bitumen by suction effect.
“It’s been a while since ground effect has had such a prominent role in Formula 1, but it offers great potential to create tighter racing“, promised Key, when this effect had been banned in 1983.
McLaren finished 4th team in 2021 and won, thanks to Ricciardo, its first Grand Prix since 2012. Norris scored four podiums last year.
After further testing in Bahrain (March 10-12), the F1 season will start on March 20 in Bahrain as well, for a record 23 Grand Prix schedule.
The team took the opportunity to unveil its vehicles entered in Indycar (North American single-seater championship) and in Extreme E (electric SUV championship).