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McLaren's Chief Designer Rob Marshall explains the new MCL40 design: “It's all new car, front to back. New regulations. As people have touched upon, the car's a bit shorter. It's actually quite a lot shorter than previous cars, a lot lighter, coupled with a brand new power unit, 50-50 hybrid, and a new set of air regulations designed to try and reduce the size of the weight behind the car, make overtaking a bit easier. If you start from the front, the new front wing is still sort of arrowhead like the previous generation, but it's a bit lower and have a much broader and wider footplate, end plate, than we used to have. And also the front wing is now actuated much like the old DRS. These new cars have got a straight line mode where both the front and rear wings will move their flaps to reduce the drag on the car and help the car get down the straights faster. There's quite a lot of freedom in how you actuate that. I think we'll see different solutions from different cars on the grid. Moving a bit further back, you've got the crash structure, which is basically from here to here. That's all new again. The regulations have changed this year where we need to make sure that after a small shunt that's enough to knock the front wing off, maybe the front half of the nose, the remaining part still serves its function as saving the driver in a secondary crash against another barrier. So that's significantly complicated the design work going into the nose. And then we've got front suspension - again, last year's front suspension was I think very innovative and so is this. We've done quite a few changes which I hope benefit us. And as we go rearward and we've got the main body of the chassis. Again, all new regulations, much tougher homologation requirements. So the crash tests and the squeezes that go into the chassis are quite brutal this year. And a lot of effort and research has gone in to try and make the car able to withstand those. Also, as I touched upon, the car is so much shorter. So a lot of the packaging of where radiators and electrical boxes, which were typically scattered around the car, finding homes for those has been very difficult. There's just less space to put them all. What's helped us there is the fuel tank is a bit smaller. We're going to use less fuel in the race. From an aerodynamic point of view, in this region here, gone are the very curved underfloors that we had with last year's cars. We're replaced with a much more flat bottom car like we had in previous generations. And then as we go rearward again, our rear suspension is actually a bit of an iteration of last year's. We're very happy with what we did last year, and so we just built upon that. Redesigned the gearbox to make it lighter and shorter for the obvious reasons. And then the rear wing is similar-ish to last year's, and the actuation mechanism is a bit like old-school DRS, but it's now mounted on two pylons, and yeah, it will now operate in conjunction with the front wing, as I said.”

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