McLaren boss Zak Brown says his team has changed its approach to pre-season testing to avoid the reliability issues that hindered its preparations last year in Barcelona.
The Woking-based outfit had a rocky start to its 2018 campaign, its new Renault-powered MCL33 suffering from a series of problems that greatly restricted the car's mileage in pre-season testing, and therefore its development.
Brown insisted McLaren has tried to put itself in a better position this year to fully capitalize on the two weeks of preparation in Spain in order to remain up to date with regard to development going forward.
"We have taken some measures to get ahead of that," he said. "We will continue to develop, as all Formula 1 teams do, on a weekly basis.”
"One of the reasons – not the only reason, but one of the reasons – why we were slower to bring performance is we had reliability issues.
"So you roll off the truck in Barcelona and instead of being able to get straight down to performance you’re immediately tackling wheel nut issues, heating issues and you then stop focussing on performance, start focusing on reliability.
"I think the team did a good job to give us reliability coming out of Spain testing to have both cars finish in the points in Australia.
"It isn’t what it looked like [being] in Spain. So I think we’re in a better place performance-wise and reliability coming into winter testing."
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