(Motorsports news) The Silverstone-based team acknowledges that the car has been lacking in that department this year, which is why it had such a challenging weekend at Monza. At the Italian Grand Prix, Fernando Alonso struggled to finish ninth, his least competitive performance of the year, and Lance Stroll finished 16th and out of the points. The squad needs to focus on efficiency, as Alonso has advocated, and Tom McCullough thinks that it should be a top priority.

When asked about the matter, McCullough responded, “Alonso touched on the efficiency of the car. We were obviously one of the slowest vehicles in the straight line there at the beginning of the year. With the base vehicle and the rear wing levels that we took to Monza, we worked on it. It’s obvious that there is room for improvement and that we must do so more for the upcoming year which will also help Alonso and Stroll.

Given that Las Vegas is the crucial event in the final stretch of the season that emphasizes efficiency as much as Spa and Monza, McCullough acknowledged that it is doubtful that adjustments will be made that will benefit this year’s model and benefit Alonso and Stroll. “There are a lot of elements that contribute to the efficiency of the car,” he said, “the main architecture of the car, the whole car more than just the rear wings, the areas that we’ve worked on.”

And the majority of the tracks are not the better efficiency tracks from now until the end of the season. Our primary priority is AMR24, and we want to make sure that we’re developing that car as efficiently as we can and more efficiently than the one from this year. McCullough continued by saying that Monza demonstrated how challenging it is with the current vehicles to achieve the ideal balance between downforce and straight-line performance.

“You can choose the rear wing level to be fast in the high-speed grip-limited corners,” he said. The second Lesmo, Ascari, and Parabolica have extremely long straights behind them, therefore it’s highly vital. You constantly have to trade off your straight-line speed and traceability for speed through those turns.

Sector One obviously has one low-speed corner and a lot of straight, or power-limited, easily flat stretches, especially during qualifying. “I believe there is a little bit of a difference in rear wing philosophy with this generation of cars and the characteristics of people’s cars.”

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