McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has explained the aggressive steps being taken at Wokingto address what has proven a relatively uncompetitive car in 2023.
Much like last season, McLaren’s start to the year was plagued with detrimental reliability issues and a general lack of peak performance.
This was only somewhat of a surprise, with the British team admitting at the MCL60 launch that delays over the winter compromised their development and progression.
With this in mind, introducing mid-season updates has long been described as the solution for the Woking squad to redirect their worrying trajectory.
Speaking to the media in Canada, Andrea Stella has outlined the team’s current progress:
“Definitely, the season so far has taught us we [must] keep on working on the car.
“We saw relatively early that this car wouldn’t have taken us very far, so we are working on pretty much redesigning the aerodynamics and some of the parts under the bodywork.
“And they [the updates] will start seeing the light in Austria and the following races…
“Yeah, we can talk about a B-spec because pretty much everything in contact with air will be redesigned.
“The shape of the car will be different, and we hope to be able to add a few tenths in terms of lap time, which should allow us to be more solidly a Q3 car and consistently score points.
“At the moment, it’s a bit of a hit-and-miss.”
Describing McLaren’s season as ‘hit-and-miss’ seems appropriate, although even the MCL60’s ‘hits’ are rarely enough to trouble the top teams.
The Austrian and British Grand Prix will be the first key indicators of how the team has progressed, as rivals like Alpine also introduce improvements.
For now, though, McLaren must work with what they have and try to take what they can from Canada.
Author: Jaden Diaz-Ndisang
