McLaren F1 team principal Andreas Seidl says that one of the team's top priorities heading into the off-season is getting on top of the new power unit that they will be supplied by Mercedes in 2022.
After a season of relative stability in terms of rules and regulations, next year will see a number of major upgrades and changes to the sport's technical specifications that could have far-reaching impact on the competition.
Anyone who can get to grips with the new rules will be in a strong position to boost their performance. McLaren is looking to improve on the fourth place in the constructors championship that they claimed this season, down one position on last year.
"We have a great team in place, we have all the talents in place that I think we need in order to make the next steps," Seidl told Motorsport.com this week. "We simply need time.
"We are ambitious, of course, but at the same time you need time to see the results of that, and I'm very happy we could make this next step."
Engines have been a particular headache for McLaren in recent years. They ended their long-standing partnership with Mercedes at the end of 2014 in favour of a new arrangement with Honda, but that went badly wrong.
After finishing last-but-one in the 2017 championship, McLaren bought its way out of the partnership in favour of Renault power units for 2018 and 2019, but in 2020 returned to the Mercedes camp.
"One very important thing this year was to get our partnership with Mercedes up and running through this year before the new technical regulations come into place," Seidl commented.
"We could gain a lot of experience this year already with the Mercedes power unit," he continued, adding that it "puts us in a better position designing a completely new car for next year already knowing the Mercedes power unit.
"That was a job really well done as well on both sides," he said.
McLaren had been looking on course to keep third place in this year's championship battle, only to suffer a results slump in the latter half of the year that left them 48.5 points behind Ferrari after Abu Dhabi.
Seidl admitted this had been "painful" but insisted that as a whole it had been "simply a great season for us for a lot of reasons.
"We made a big step forward again with the car in terms of getting closer with the lap times in quali and in the race to Mercedes and Red Bull," he explained. "We were even in a position this year to occasionally challenge them at the tracks which were suiting our car.
"In terms of reliability we had a very good season, again in terms of operational strength out here at the track," he continued. "We made steps forward also with consistency and speed of the pitstops.
"Simply the way how we work together as a team was clearly for me the next step again, which is the most important thing for me to see."
"We made a major reset to the team two years ago in terms of organisation [and] culture," he added. "And we created now stability which hasn't been there before at McLaren for several years."
Lando Norris and Daniel Ricciardo will both return to the team next year, with the Australian this year picking up his first post-Red Bull Grand Prix victory since 2018 in Monaco with his win at Monza.
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