McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has admitted that the team probably needs up to a full 12 months of upgrades to tackle the current weaknesses of the MCL38 and make the car the best that it can be.
Last year the team suffered a miserable start to the season, but then pulled off a remarkable turnaround from Austria onwards as new components radically changed their prospects over the summer and into the autumn.
It meant that last year's car went from being one of the slowest in testing, to being arguably the nearest rival to the Red Bull RB20 by the season finale in Abu Dhabi.
And the team has had a much better start to 2024. While Red Bull are once again at the top, followed at the moment by Ferrari, Lando Norris was on the podium in Melbourne followed by his team mate Oscar Piastri in fourth.
It means that McLaren are currently in third place in the constructores championship ahead of Mercedes. But Stella is aware that this year's car still had notable weaknesses that will take time to address.
"Erasing the weaknesses is car development," Stella explained to the media in Melbourne, including Motorsport Week. “It’s not like you have these weaknesses because something goes wrong.
"There’s nothing going wrong, it’s just the car is not developed enough and these aspects expose themselves into you becoming weak in long corners, or you don’t have enough speed in DRS.
“But this is effectively a consequence of the development," he pointed out. "There’s nothing going wrong.
"You need to raise the operating point from a performance point of view, aerodynamic efficiency, mechanical grip and so on," he explained.
“If you ask me how is the car behaving, I say it’s behaving very well, like it goes as expected. It does exactly what we expect from the wind tunnel, it does what we expect from the computer development.
“So we are extremely happy with the rate of development over the last 12 months. But there’s I would say another 12 months development that we need to go through to actually offer a car that is strong in DRS and strong in the long corners.”
Just because Stella is talking about a 12 month process certainly doesn't mean that the team isn't getting on with the development work as quickly as possible.
"I think I said it already: around race six, seven we should have a decent round of upgrades," he said, targeting the introduction of new parts in time for the start of the European phase of the season in May.
“Hopefully there will be potentially another couple of them throughout the season and this is why it will take the whole season to actually add enough performance for being here and saying we don’t see these weaknesses anymore."
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