McLaren's new Formula 1 front wing has finally earned its place on the MCL40 for the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix after being trialled and shelved in both Montreal and Monaco.

The wing was first seen in Canada as part of the second step of an upgrade package that followed on from an initial batch of new parts deployed in Miami.

However, early feedback in FP1 was inconclusive, and given the time pressures of a sprint weekend, the drivers reverted to the standard item.

A tweaked version was then run in practice in Monaco, although the testing was compromised by Lando Norris losing a whole session to a mechanical issue, and again, it wasn’t used beyond practice.

A further refinement featuring revised end plates appeared in Barcelona, and after this latest iteration worked well on Friday, it was retained for both qualifying and the race.

In recent years, McLaren upgrades have usually been adopted straight away. However, team boss Andrea Stella has downplayed the significance of the slightly convoluted path that the new wing has taken.

“The front wing is a project that took a couple of races to understand exactly how to use it, what it was delivering,” he said.

“We took a couple of modifications since the first time we introduced it, and these modifications were effective. So we are happy now with the performance, with the correlation of the data compared to the development tools.

“We used it on both cars, and we think that this has added lap time, and I would like to praise the effort of the team, who have been extremely responsive once we saw that there were a few things that needed to be made, and needed to be designed and produced.

“And we did it for Monaco, and then there were a few more, and we did them for Spain, so I would say this completes the first round of upgrades of the car.”

Stella stressed that new parts will continue to arrive at the track on a regular basis this year, as soon as they are ready.

“We are obviously working on some more upgrades, but like I've said this year more than large packages. we will see a continuous development in the various areas of the car, because the design itself – and this is true for everyone, we saw Ferrari having upgrades in Miami, and upgrades here – the design of the car for all teams is still so immature, and in a way, so responsive to the basic development, that you want to take these developments as soon as possible.”

Stella remains confident that McLaren is on the right track with aero development, despite the wing delay.

“I think what we saw with the front wing is that there were some aspects which were not only aerodynamic, but there were some others from a mechanical point of view that needed to be evolved,” he said.

“So we remain quite happy with the overall consistency and of the aerodynamic development, because this is the main source through which all teams will add lap time this year. I think this keeps being a point of strength.”

He added: “I see continuation with what we were doing the last years. I think the last years, we were simply just clearer as to the direction as to what kind of geometries you need to pursue, and we have been very good in out-developing everyone, all the other teams in pursuing these concepts.

“At this stage, instead, and I think again this is true for all teams, the rules are so new that you are still exploring various directions, you have seen it on the front wing. I think we will see, or we have seen it already from a bodywork point of view.

“If you see the area of the floor ahead of the rear tyres, you still see the teams have not converged, so I think we will see convergence, but this may take another one year, possibly.”

Stella also clarified that the team played a curfew joker in Barcelona because it wanted to change some parts around the power unit installation for fresher items – in essence, work that could not be done within the regular schedule.

“It's the second time in a row that we break curfew,” he said. “Monaco, we did it because we needed to investigate the problem that happened on Lando's car with the car switching off, and involving some aspects on the electrical side for the chassis part and the power unit part. And we needed to investigate, and we needed to rectify, which took our mechanics to work up until 4 o'clock in the morning.

“So I already thanked them, but I take advantage to do it once again. In this case, we used the curfew, because as we continue to try and understand the problem that happened on Lando during the race, we wanted to inspect the area.

“And we wanted to refresh the parts, such that there's in the meantime a containment through mileage, while together with HPP, we try and understand more technically and more fundamentally a solution that can be a more permanent containment.”