McLaren experienced a difficult start with the new era of ground effect single-seaters in Formula 1. In pre-season it was one of the teams that suffered the most, while in the first race of the course in Bahrain, they could not get past 14th and 15th place.
Despite the difficulties at the beginning, the Woking team has been able to turn the situation around and catch up. In fact, he is currently fifth in the constructors’ championship, with six races to go before the end of the season.
However, the gap to the top teams is still quite large and McLaren is worse off compared to a year ago in terms of numbers. By this time, the Brits had scored five podium finishes and one victory, which gave them fourth place in the constructors at the end of 2021.
In 2022 they have only achieved one podium and are behind Alpine in the standings. However, for team principal Andreas Seidl , that is not reason enough to throw everything away and build an entirely new car for 2023.
Rather, the new McLaren will be “a mix” of current and new concepts. “Because the technical rules remain pretty much the same, of course it won’t be a total revolution,” Seidl said of the new 2023 car.
“Obviously we have to improve more than our rivals, because the teams in front right now are more than a second faster than us,” admits Seidl. In addition, it must be remembered that in the medium term their goal is to fight again for victories and even titles.
“We have a clear picture as to which areas we want to improve and which areas we are most satisfied with,” explained Seidl, who believes it would be wrong to try to replicate Red Bull for 2023.
“You can see that there are completely different concept cars that do almost the same lap time,” Seidl explained. It is a “complex” task to replicate a Formula 1 car from another team and therefore McLaren believes it is best to go its own way in 2023.
Only the future will tell if that will take the team back to the top in the next few years or, on the contrary, they will be stuck in the middle zone and will not be able to fight for victories.
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