McLaren is currently fighting behind Red Bull and Ferrari against Mercedes and Aston Martin, and team principal Andrea Stella revealed the team is preparing “major upgrades” that will arrive in a few races.
Stella admitted that the British outfit already has something in store for Melbourne and maybe Suzuka, but those updates won’t bring much performance. However, McLaren will hopefully be able to bring more upgrades around race six or seven.
“We have some minor things that will come for Australia and hopefully for Japan, but they will be [delivering] a few milliseconds.
“And then hopefully, within the first third of the season, we will have a major upgrade. It’s going to be for around race six or seven.”
Stella added that in Jeddah, McLaren opted for a different approach in how to set up the car, and it worked better than in Bahrain. However, that doesn’t mean improving by much, and to do that upgrades are needed.
“I think there is margin to understand the car a little bit more. In Jeddah, we had a slightly different approach to setup between the two cars. And I think we see some interesting positives and negatives.
“This optimization is maybe worth like one-tenth, it’s not like you can find any magic. We know the car well, apart from this little difference between the two cars that we will review.
“I think it’s very much a matter of upgrades or adaptation to the track in relation to the track characteristics.”
The McLaren team principal concluded by underlining the two key weaknesses that the British outfit needs to fix, but he also pointed out one of the MCL38’s strong features: “You will have seen that anybody behind the McLaren in sector one [in Jeddah] would lose ground. When you have these fast, flowing corners in which it’s enough to do a first steer input, the car responds very well.
“When instead the corners are long, and you need to really hold the steering wheel for a long time, the car gives up a little bit, and we lose a lot of time.
“That is where Ferrari is very strong, and that’s why Leclerc was so competitive in the last sector, just that [last] corner.
“And the other limitation was still we would like to have more top speed. On those two features, we were very well exposed at this track.”