McLaren wants to be cautious before Baku
Before the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, McLaren wants to play it safe despite showing good progress in the recent races.
McLaren recently unveiled the goal to achieve for the team this season: a fourth place in the constructors’ standings. Because since the first race in Bahrain, where the Woking team was in total disarray, the improvements made to the MCL36 have been working quite well.
McLaren is now fighting for fourth place with Alfa Romeo and Alpine. After seven races, the ball is in Zak Brown’s team’s court, who has an 18-point lead over Frédéric Vasseur’s team and a 19-point lead over the French team.
In Monaco, Lando Norris once again brought home valuable points, securing nine units with a sixth-place finish, while Daniel Ricciardo once again ended up outside of the top ten. Two races ago in Barcelona, Norris had managed an eighth-place finish despite being significantly weakened by tonsillitis. These results are therefore encouraging for McLaren.
But Andreas Seidl, the team principal, doesn’t want to get too ahead of himself before Baku and points out that the current package will still have a few more races before significant improvements are implemented. We took a good step forward in Barcelona and corrected some weaknesses in the car. But at the same time, many other teams did the same. As for upgrades, I think we will now work with this package that we have in place for the next races. There are always tweaks or minor evolutions.
Baku is a track where predictions are complicated according to Seidl. Baku, obviously, and Montreal are different tracks, so it’s really difficult to predict. We have seen significant fluctuations in terms of the hierarchy so far this year, and therefore, I am very cautious about making too many predictions.
Seidl acknowledges that the battle for fourth place is very tough. We must not forget that the competition is so close where we are, just a tenth or two more or less means that instead of being in a position to fight for P7 or P8, you suddenly find yourself in P13, P14. That’s the competition we are in. It is obviously always important to maximize everything we have at our disposal, and I hope it is enough to give Alpine, Alfa Romeo, and others a hard time in these upcoming races.
Lando Norris already has a podium this year, at Imola. And if the young Briton could secure a second top three finish this year due to unpredictable events, which often occur in Baku. Daniel Ricciardo will have to raise his level to help McLaren in their quest for fourth place.
