Bite Size Tech: McLaren MP4-29 Front Wing - Abu Dhabi

By McLaren's high standards the team have struggled over the last couple of seasons, this has also been a transitional year owing to their change to the Honda powerunit for 2015, whilst serious personnel changes have also been made.  One of the major coup's for McLaren was extracting Peter Prodromou from Red Bull, as he'll now head the aero department.  Small interim changes to the car since his arrival have had all the hallmarks of his handy work, but in Abu Dhabi we see that the '29' has been treated to several Red Bull-esque alterations.

The image above is from @ScarbsF1

 

The new Front Wing is a blatant copy of the RB10's, of course there will be different shaping and AoA on the flaps, cascades, strakes etc but the core ideology of the wing is retained, piece for piece.

The most recent of changes seem to be missing but that's hardly surprising, given that they were done after Peter's departure and are part of the evolutionary process he wasn't privy to.  It could be argued that given a good result upon transference to the '29' any team could copy the wing from the images available, however they do not fully impart the knowledge of how it operates (understanding how the carbon is laid-up to create it's dynamic is something you cannot fully ascertain from pictures alone). 

The wing's predecessor clearly shows that their is an ethos to which Peter and his new team are trying to achieve, in terms how the wing is constructed.  We know that the flexi-wings of the past created a definite performance advantage and teams can't simply forget this, granted the deflection tests are now much more stringent but this won't prevent the teams from trying to circumnavigate them.