McLaren CEO Zak Brown says that his team is focussing on closing the gap to the top three teams in the Formula 1 constructors championship next season and stopping their recent downward slide in the standings.
McLaren was third in 2020, a season which saw a particularly poor performance from Ferrari. The following season they dropped to fourth, and in 2022 they were also pipped by Alpine by 14 points.
That left them in fifth overall, a long way from where McLaren wants to be. Dismissing the challenge from Alpine, Brown said that the target for this season would be to catch up to Mercedes and cutting the gap to the top-placed teams.
That's a big target: between them, McLaren drivers Lando Norris and Daniel Ricciardo took 159 points last year, while Mercedes - despite having a terrible season by their standards - were on 515 points.
The gap between McLaren and 2022 champions Red Bull was even greater, a whopping 600 points after Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez clinched 17 Grand Prix wins over the course of the campaign.
Appearing on Australian motorsport news website Speedcafe.com's KTM Summer Grill just before Christmas, Brown confirmed that McLaren's first objective in 2023 would be "closing the gap to the front of the field."
“We kind of have two data points that we pay most attention to," he continued. "One is, how close are we to the team that’s winning?
“If that team is not Mercedes, our other data point – given what a great team Mercedes is, and we share the same engine – is how close are we to Mercedes?
“So those are our two primary data points from a competitive standpoint, and we want to be closer to them [tis year] than we were [in 2022].
“Beyond that it’s hard to set a very specific number to that," he acknowledged. “Of course, we’d like to get back up to at least fourth in the championship.
"But I think we’re going to need a little bit more of our technology in place to really be able to break into the top three," he admitted.
One of the advantages enjoyed by their rival teams was having both drivers working effectively together to contribute to the overall team points tally.
That was notably not the case at McLaren. Norris contributed 122 points to the pot and finished in P7 in the drivers championship, while Ricciardo had a wretched time and pulled in just 37 points over the course of 22 races.
Brown continued to call Ricciardo's failure to thrive during a two-year stint at Woking "a great mystery".
“We’ve certainly analysed it. We gave it everything we’ve got, Daniel gave it everything he’s got and our relationship with Daniel was great.
“It was clearly disappointing for both of us as to the outcome but I think it’s a bit of a great mystery as to why. I don’t think Daniel knows, we don’t know, we tried everything. Maybe we worked too hard.
“I think ultimately that’s why we both decided to make a change because we had tried everything and we really didn’t know why it wasn’t clicking."
As a result, Brown took the decision to negotiate an early end to Ricciardo's contract with the team, and replaced him with former Formula 2 champion Oscar Piastri for 2023, while Ricciardo will return to Red Bull as a third driver.
"Hopefully a change of environment for him [means] he’ll get his magic back because for sure he’s a magical guy," Brown said. "But we needed to make a change because we couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong.
The team will also have to contend with a change of team principal, with Andreas Seidl having moved to take up the reins of the Sauber operation that currently runs the Alfa Romeo entry on the F1 grid.
Seidl's place at the held of the McLaren team will be taken by Andrea Stella who had previously worked under Seidl as executive director (racing).
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