McLaren F1 team principal Andreas Seidl says he is still feeling the long-term effects of early-season brake problems in his battle against the Alpine F1 team.
McLaren faces a heated battle with the Alpine F1 team for the top spot in the Constructors’ Championship behind Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes for the remainder of 2022.
The Alpine F1 team has revealed that it will be bringing a significant floor update to the upcoming Singapore F1 GP, and it looks like it will take 4th place.
Meanwhile, McLaren admits it paid the price for a difficult start to 2022. At the season-opening F1 Bahrain Grand Prix, it took some time to overcome the brake overheating problem it encountered in pre-season testing, and he was pushed to the back of the pack. The effort required to solve this problem had to divert resources from other performance areas of the car, which had poor results in terms of pushing development throughout the season.
When asked if the effects of the brake problem could have made a difference in the final battle with the Alpine F1 team, Andreas Seidl said: “Of course it didn’t help.”
“Especially at this point in the season. In the end, we had to use a lot of resources to fix issues that we wanted to use immediately for performance development.”
Despite the lasting effects of what happened in the early races, Andreas Seidl praised how McLaren overcame the problem, eventually making some progress in addressing the car’s weaknesses.
“I think we have made good progress in areas where we were weak last year,” said Seidl.
“At the same time, we can clearly see that we are less competitive in the rest of the season compared to the last two seasons.”
“But at the end of the day, I think it’s been a fresh start this year. Looking back at how this season has gone, we know it was a tough start because of the brakes in the Bahrain test. In this era of F1.” Going in, it was simply behind initial performance.”
“We were definitely not where we wanted to be, but at the same time I think the team responded strongly throughout the season and came back.”
“I haven’t forgotten where we were in the first race in Bahrain. We were almost at the back of the field.”
McLaren felt they had an opportunity to do better, but Seidl says he understands that given how bad things were in Bahrain, things could have been just as bad.
“Considering that, looking at the progress we can achieve with the package we presented, the correlation was good, positive in fact,” said Seidl.
“But it was a difficult start, so we have to accept where we are now, fourth and fifth, which is a good recovery compared to where we started the season.”
Category: F1 / mclaren
