McLaren may be enduring one of its worst seasons ever but racing director Eric Boullier is praising the team's 'amazing' aerodynamic development in 2017.
Pinned down by the dismal performance and reliability of its Honda power unit, McLaren is still struggling to extract itself from the doldrums after three years of under-performance.
While its partner attempts to solve its engine issues, McLaren's engineers have took the team's MCL32 chassis to the next level, introducing a significant aero upgrade in Spain and additional tweaks in Monaco which have been beneficial.
"As the engineers would say, ‘as per map’ – [we’re] very happy," Boullier told Motorsport.com.
"It’s the step we wanted to achieve.
"The correlation is amazing. We have 95 percent of what we were expecting, so this is brilliant. Now we trust our process.
"It’s not only aero, it’s also chassis, suspension - everything is as per process. Every time we put a milestone somewhere we know what to expect.
"The natural tendency is a deviation, but we are happy we have achieved what we wanted to achieve through our new processes. We can trust the way we work now."
There doesn't seem to be much doubt about the MCL32's potential ability to beat its rivals at the upper end of the mid-field, if only its power unit could hold up its end of the bargain.
While Honda hopefully makes a step forward, sooner rather than later, Boullier says McLaren now has a clear validated reference for future development and progress.
"We have set the reference up, so now we know what we have achieved – what we wanted to achieve and we continue," Boullier added.
"For us it was internal targets to see if our procedures, our process works - and it works, so we are now very confident in our capacity to achieve our next targets.
"The car will keep on developing but we are happy with the platform."
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