McLaren ‘raised the bar’ in Barcelona as performance takes priority

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella believes the team’s disciplined approach and increased attention to detail helped deliver a smooth weekend in Barcelona, with the Woking squad finally enjoying the kind of reliability it has been chasing throughout a challenging season.

After a campaign marked by several Mercedes power unit-related interruptions – particularly affecting Lando Norris during practice sessions – McLaren arrived at the Circuit de Catalunya determined to eliminate operational weaknesses and maximise track time.

The weekend in Spain provided a welcome change, with the team completing the event without the reliability setbacks that had disrupted previous weekends.

McLaren responds to early-season setbacks

Asked about the significance of completing race weekend according to plan, Stella highlighted the progress made while stressing that reliability improvements must be judged over a longer period rather than a single event.

“Finally, a relatively calm and clean weekend from a reliability point of view," he told reporters in Barcelona.

"Of course, we don't have to forget that in some of the previous weekends we didn't only have problems on Sunday but we also had problems affecting practice. So there's been improvement from this point of view.

“Reliability, you know, I don't want to judge it in a single race. I would like to judge it in a season and say we had a couple of exceptions. But we have to rebuild from where we were, so we take one race at a time, one event at a time.

“Good that we haven't had any issues here in Spain. We have definitely raised the bar, the level of attention, used the situations we had in the previous races to reset and increase the standards in the way we do things."

The comments come during a season where teams have been forced into an intense development battle following major technical regulation changes.

With rivals continuing to introduce upgrades, reliability has become just as important as outright performance in the fight for competitiveness.

McLaren’s ultimate target

While McLaren welcomed the flawless execution in Spain, Stella made clear that avoiding problems is only the foundation. The team’s priority remains extracting more speed from its MCL40 package, with operational improvements designed to ensure engineers and drivers can concentrate fully on development.

Stella also pointed to the importance of maintaining strong cooperation with Mercedes’ High Performance Powertrains division as McLaren seeks to avoid further interruptions.

• Read also: Norris notes McLaren progress but MCL40 ‘still a handful’

“This is McLaren and this is also McLaren, our suppliers and our collaboration with HPP. We need to retain the standards,” Stella noted.

The mission is very clear. We only want to think about performance, an area of performance in which we also have quite a lot to improve.”

For McLaren, Barcelona represented more than just a trouble-free weekend. It was evidence that lessons from earlier difficulties had been absorbed, with Stella hoping the improved standards will allow the team to devote its full attention to the pursuit of performance gains.

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