Though he is confident that McLaren can take the fight to Red Bull this season and win races, he admits that beating the Austrian team over the course of the season will be “challenging”.
The Woking outfit is feeling a lot more confident than it did twelve months ago, the team having admitted that as early as last year’s launch it knew its car was a dud.
However, rather than moaning about it the team took the same advice Christian Horner offered to Toto Wolff, returning to the drawing board to fix its f****** car.
The turnaround in the second half of the season was remarkable, allowing Oscar Piastri to score a Sprint win, the team to record numerous podiums and finish fourth in the standings.
Speaking after today’s shakedown at a damp Silverstone, Lando Norris was confident that the performance shown at the end of last season will continue.
“If you were to say ‘are they beatable?’ you’re going to have to say yes,” said the Briton. “I think we want to believe to say yes, because we were very close at certain times and at certain times we did beat them.
“The question is can we beat them over a season,” he continued, “because I think that’s going to be the challenging thing and I think that’s going to be very difficult to do with how well they are performing.
“So, yeah, I’m optimistic. It’s possible to beat them at certain times, I want to believe so. Yes.”
“We also have to be aware it’s not just Red Bull we’re fighting,” added teammate Piastri. “We were in a very intense battle with Mercedes and Ferrari especially in the second half of the year in terms of championship points.
“I think there will be other top teams making progress as well,” he added.
Asked his first impression of the MCL38, the Australian said: “The main thing is I jumped in and felt very comfortable straight away, no surprises or anything. As these kind of days go, it was smooth sailing.”
The drivers optimism is shared by team boss, Zak Brown.
“We feel good,” he told Sky Sports. “It’s been a good winter, we’re happy with the development… never quite happy enough, but I think all the men and women at McLaren have done a fantastic job.
“It feels like we’ve continued on our development pace from where we were the second half of last year. So as long as the data is accurate, I think we should start pretty strong.
“Of course, you never know what the competition’s doing,” he admitted. “But we definitely feel we’ve taken a step forward.”
Asked his expectations for the season ahead, the American said: “I think I’d say ambition versus expect, because you ultimately don’t know what the competition’s done and no one’s standing still. Our hopes, our goals, our ambition is to definitely take a step forward. We finished fourth in the championship last year, but the second half of the year we were the second, third quickest team. So our ambition is to move forward from there.
“We see no reason why if we don’t continue on the development pace, why we can’t be winning races at some point over the year,” he added. “So, you know, lots of podiums and some wins are certainly the ambition. Time will tell whether we’re fast enough and what the competition’s done.”
Following the trend of abandoning glitzy launches, McLaren, like the majority of its rivals opted to issue images (renders) of its new car on social media, though unlike most the car subsequently took to the track.
The renders had been purposefully created in order that certain parts of the car were hard to see, leading to claims that the Woking outfit has something up its sleeve.
Not so, insists Andrea Stella.
“We have seen recently that teams decide to have some style to launch the car, like we had last year where there was a show and it was launched at the MTC, live streaming, but we also see that sometimes you may want to have a lower profile in launching your car,” he said.
“So I guess also these approaches can be alternated over time, and we went from last year’s glamorous one to this year which is low profile. This is not only technical or operational aspects, this is also marketing and commercial. Formula 1 is a large business, it’s not only technical like I say, and we need to take into account all of these requirements and variety of approaches.”
Asked how similar the renders are to the real thing, he replied: “I would say pretty accurate. I wouldn’t be prepared for anything too shocking. To be honest, even myself, I needed to look at the pictures like ‘okay, yeah, yeah, a detail has been hidden. So nothing too major.”
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