A time consuming and laborious campaign

The team picture

• Constructors standing: P5, 159 points

McLaren hit problems right at the start of pre-season testing with brake issues, and although the immediate trouble was swiftly resolved it seemed to put them on the back foot for the rest of the season compared to their closest rivals Alpine.

McLaren's primary objective this year was to retain their position as 'best of the rest' behind the big three teams - Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes. While it was a close-run battle right to the end, they ended up missing out and lost fourth place to Alpine by a relatively narrow 14 points in the final standings.

You could play the 'what if?' game and suggest that if Daniel Ricciardo had been anywhere near close to the performance of Lando Norris then P4 in the championship would have been a shoey-in. But then Alpine could counter-argue that without so many reliability problems on Fernando Alonso's car it wouldn't have been a close contest in e first place. Fifth was a fair result for McLaren - not a disaster, but a sharp reminder that they must do better.

The driver line-up

• Lando Norris: P7, 122 points
• Daniel Ricciardo: P11, 37 points

When Daniel Ricciardo decided to head to McLaren in 2021 to join Lando Norris, everyone feared that the driver head-to-head would be a landslide. And it was: just not the way round that everyone had been expecting. Ricciardo might have been the surprise winner of last year's Italian GP (with Norris second), but this season there has been no where to hide for the veteran Aussie.

Ricciardo was comprehensively thrashed in terms of qualifying/grid positions by Norris by 20 to two, and by 16 to five in terms of race finishes across the season. Norris took the only podium secured by a driver outside the top three teams (with third place at Monza) and finished the year with three times the number of points of Ricciardo. Given that Norris is on a fraction of the star salary paid to Ricciardo, the writing was on the wall for Ricciardo from very early on.

Just why Ricciardo fared so badly at McLaren - and why he failed to make so little improvement across the two seasons he spent at Woking - is a mystery that will haunt both him and the team. Hopefully he'll find a way to regroup with a year back at Red Bull as their third driver. Meanwhile Norris faces a new chapter in his career as de facto team leader at McLaren for the first time in 2023.

How 2023 is looking for McLaren

While it might not have been exactly a surprise, finishing the season in fifth place behind Alpine will have been a blow to McLaren. On top of that, the squad goes into 2023 having lost one part of the management dream team that CEO Zak Brown had assembled at Woking, with Andreas Seidl opting to depart for Sauber to spearhead their project with Audi.

Andrea Stella might not have the same team principal experience as Seidl, but he knows McLaren inside out and his former role as executive director (racing) did always seem to undervalue his abilities, suggesting he has been Seidl's understudy from the start and is now deemed ready for prime time.

If they can avoid the pre-season mistakes that made this year, and if new recruit Oscar Piastri can live up to his rising star reputation and deliver results in a way that Ricciardo singularly failed to do, then there's every reason that McLaren will be back to 'best of the rest' again. But they can't afford to rest on their laurels if they're going to pull it off, and top three seems out of reach again for now.

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