F1 News - Latest F1 News

McLaren boss Martin Whitmarsh is optimistic the team will be in a position to use its new exhaust-fed diffuser throughout the upcoming German Grand Prix weekend, as it seeks to stem Red Bull’s growing momentum and retain the lead of both championships.

The Woking squad had to revert to the conventional floor on its MP4-25 after discovering handling and overheating problems when it ran the new system on the opening day of the British GP meeting earlier this month.

The team has since conducted extensive analysis of the data it gathered at Silverstone and plans to evaluate a modified version of the blown diffuser in Friday practice at Hockenheim via back-to-back tests with the standard floor.

In a Vodafone McLaren Mercedes phone-in on Tuesday, Whitmarsh reiterated that a final decision on which configuration to race would not be taken until Friday evening – but suggested it was more likely than not the new diffuser would prove race-ready.

“We can’t be entirely confident, but we go into Hockenheim with more information and we’ve made some modifications in the light of that data,” he said.

“We will be running the blown diffuser on Friday. I suspect we’ll have it on for the weekend, but we’ll make the call in the light of the data on Friday evening.”

Whitmarsh said it was conceivable that one of its cars would race with the blown diffuser and the other without if the drivers expressed contrasting opinions of it – but insisted both would be given the same opportunity to evaluate it.

“We’re working at the moment on the premise that we’ll have blown diffusers on both cars to start with,” he said.

“At Silverstone Lewis wanted to keep the blown diffuser on the car on Friday night, but we took the decision there to switch them both back to the older diffuser.

“So we’ll se. You could end up dividing the drivers if there was a preference from one side of the garage to the other.

“If I can I will avoid that, but we’ll do it if we think it’s the right way to perform during the course of that weekend.

“There are advantages from running one car in one configuration and one in the other – provided that in so doing you don’t end up, rightly or wrongly, accused of treating the two drivers differently.”

He added that performing a true back-to-back comparison would be difficult because it would not be possible to alternate between the two floors in the course of a single practice session, but the team hopes it will get a clear enough read to come to a judgement.

“One of the challenges is that whereas flaps, wings and various aerodynamic appendages are fairly quickly changed on a car, and therefore you can do back-to-back tests during the course of a session, the blown diffuser is a completely different floor, involves different heat management components, obviously a different exhaust and therefore it is not possible to perform an in-session back-to-back.

“It’s quite difficult to do it even between the two [Friday practice] sessions.”ITV-F1