The Woking outfit is locked in an intense battle with Alpine for fourth place in the constructors’ championship behind Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes.
And while Alpine look favorite to finish ahead, especially after revealing they are bringing a major upgrade to the Singapore GP, McLaren accepts it has paid the price for its rocky start to the 2022 season.
The brake overheating problems they suffered in pre-season and in the first race left them closer to the bottom of the grid than to the middle zone. And the effort required to fix that problem forced resources to be diverted from other areas of the car’s performance, which had consequences for development throughout the year.
Asked if the impact of the brake problems could have made a difference in the fight with Alpine, Andreas Seidl said: “Of course it didn’t help, because in the end we had to use a lot of resources to fix the problem that you would have preferred to use. directly for performance development, especially at that time of the season.
McLaren MCL36, front brake detail
Despite the lingering effects of what happened in the first race, at that Bahrain GP, Seidl has praised the way the team managed to overcome the problem, and feels they have made progress in addressing the weaknesses in their car.
“I think we’ve made a good step forward in the areas where we had weak points last year,” he said. “At the same time obviously we see that we are less competitive in the balance of the season compared to the last two seasons. But I think in the end this year has been a new start.”
“When you look now at how the season has been, we know what a difficult start we had due to the brake problem in the Bahrain tests, which simply left us with a changed foot in terms of early performance to start this new era of Formula 1. .
“For sure, we haven’t been where we wanted to be. But, at the same time, I think the team has shown a strong reaction throughout the season, coming from behind.”
“We haven’t forgotten where we were in Bahrain in the first race: we were more or less at the back of the grid.
Although McLaren sensed that there might be opportunities to do better, Seidl is also aware that things could have gone even worse given how bad they were in Bahrain.
“Taking that into account, looking at the progress that we were able to make with the enhancement packs that we put in and that worked, the correlation was good, which was actually a positive thing,” he said.
“But due to the difficult start to the season, we have to accept that we are where we are now, between fourth and fifth, which is a good recovery compared to where we started the season.”
