Brown: Mini DRS Did Not Make As Much Difference As People Think

Tuesday, 08 October 2024 at 11:34

McLaren CEO Zak Brown stated that the mini DRS rear wing did not make as much of a difference as F1 rivals made it seem.

The McLaren Racing team brought an interesting invention to the 2024 Azerbaijan Grand Prix, the track with the longest straight in the Formula 1 calendar.

The Papaya team mounted a new rear wing on their car, and as snapshots and videos after the race revealed, the top flap of the wing slightly bent under the high-speed airflow, resulting in an effect that came to be known as the "mini DRS."

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It wasn't clear exactly how much speed this new trick gained McLaren. Some experts estimated a maximum of 3km/h (1.86 mph), and according to PlanetF1, it might have been even less than that.

Rival F1 teams like Red Bull and Ferrari instantly noticed what was going on, and they were not happy about McLaren's new inventions.

Some F1 fans even accused the British team of cheating, which, of course, wasn't the case. The McLaren passed all the tests and had this rear wing approved by the FIA before installing it on the car.

While the team principal, Andrea Stella, and the CEO, Zak Brown, claimed it was fully legal, the team, for some reason, agreed to remove it from their car moving forward. Brown told The Times:

"Whoever's winning, everyone's always staring at the car to understand what they're doing."

"It's totally natural that people are staring at our car at the moment and then coming to conclusions, a lot of them incorrectly. We've passed every single test."

"We offered to make a small modification, just because we don't think it will make much of a difference and there's a lot of noise around it — so to demonstrate that there's no secret sauce, we were like, 'Well, we'll modify it slightly."