McLaren drivers facing long wait for significant upgrades

Upgrades can’t come soon enough for Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, but the McLaren pair will likely be made to wait until the Canadian Grand Prix before their MCL60 contender sees a step forward.

After McLaren introduced a revised floor in Azerbaijan, where Norris finished ninth, team papaya held the hope of achieving another top ten result in Miami.

Alas, the team’s results fell well short of expectations, leaving Norris and Piastri stranded all weekend among the laggards, their MCL60 clearly at odds with Miami’s layout and fresh track surface.

While small updates will see the light of day at Imola next week, McLaren team principal Andrea Stella says McLaren’s real update cycle will start at next month’s Canadian Grand Prix.

“The next sizable package of updates will arrive before the summer break,” said Stella.

“We are planning to spread the updates between the Canadian Grand Prix and the British Grand Prix.”

• Read also: Piastri reveals cause of 'terrible pace' in Miami GP

Stella said McLaren would likely exclude the Austrian Grand Prix from its development schedule as the race weekend at the Red Bull Ring features a Sprint event.

“We will definitely avoid bringing new updates to Austria, because that will be a sprint shootout and sprint race weekend,” added the Italian.

“And given the amount of updates we will bring we are not confident in bringing them to an event that will be very similar to Baku.

“In Baku we brought the new floor, but in those races we will bring bigger things and the floor will be introduced in Britain.”

Stella justified the team’s minor incremental update at next week’s Emilia Romagna Grand Prix by the timeline of McLaren’s development programme.

"If you have a setup issue, then you can react in the space between now and Imola,” Stella explained.

“But at the moment, we have more issues to do with the specification of the car and with the package," he explained.

“You have to design, build, produce, and so on. So what happens in Imola is what we decided one month ago.

“There is little developments coming for Imola, but they are minor compared to the step we need to make to be consistently in the points.”

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