McLaren in a race with Alpine, can't make mistakes – Brown

Zak Brown believes McLaren can overhaul Alpine and capture fifth in F1's Constructors' standings, but it will require a flawless effort from team papaya.

Ahead of this week's round of racing at Silverstone, McLaren currently sits sixth in the championship with 29 points, 18 points adrift from Alpine.

In Austria last weekend, McLaren achieved its best result year-to-date, with Lando Norris finishing P4 at the Red Bull Ring, a performance that also validated the first stage update implemented on its car at Spielberg.

The second and third packages will be introduced at Silverstone and in Hungary and will hopefully allow McLaren to challenge Alpine over the summer and in the back half of the 2023 season.

"They're definitely beatable, but it's going to be tough," Brown said.

"Up to this point, they've got a fast racing car and two drivers that have the ability to run at the front, and I am sure they've got upgrades coming.

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"We'll have Oscar's car [at Silverstone] where Lando's car was [in Austria], Lando will have some further upgrades that Oscar will have one race later and then we do have, as other teams do, upgrades throughout the year - and one more significant upgrade coming later in the year.

"We're in the race with Alpine now and I think we can't make any mistakes.

"We're going to have to have a good reliable car, get our pitstops right, our starts right, and not have any unlucky incidents, but I think the fight with Alpine will go on [throughout] the year."

McLaren has undergone several significant changes in the past few months, starting with Andrea Stella moving up and replacing former McLaren F1 team principal Andreas Seidl.

The Italian was given carte blanche by Brown to restructure the team's engineering department. Former technical director James Key has left the outfit, while a new three-pronged technical executive team is in the process of being set up.

Furthermore, McLaren's long-awaited infrastructure plans are finally unfolding with the team's new wind-tunnel now online.

Overall, Brown is happy with Stella's stewardship at the helm of Mclaren's F1 team.

"I'm very happy with everything I'm seeing out of Andrea and the racing team," said the American.

"From the minute I put Andrea in charge, we called out position out at the launch, we knew we weren't going to be strong at the start of the year and weren't surprised by it.

"Andrea then went about making changes rapidly - and when we look at our development curve from when he restructured, moving some people around, bringing in some new people who haven't started, the development rate has been much better than we saw last year.

"Austria was a great validation, as we thought we'd be pretty strong.

"We need to make sure that continues at other races and that it wasn't track specific, we've got a lot more development coming.

"Our hopes, I wouldn't want to predict where it will be, but our desires are that it'd be mingling with the top four teams like we did [in Austria.]," Brown added.

"Obviously, there's a big points gap with the top four teams, so whether we can match that is probably a tall order.

"The battle with Alpine and others for fifth is very much on, and I hope that we can continue with the development race and have more weekends like we had [in Austria] where we are playing with the top four teams on a per race basis."

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