McLaren Targets Miami GP With a “More Competitive” Reworked MCL40

Stella highlighted that he expects other teams to follow a similar strategy with their cars, so the pecking order may not change significantly. He added:

“But I could say overall that across Miami and Canada, we will see an entirely new MCL40. Again, I would like to stress that this is what I would expect of most of our competitors. So not necessarily is going to be a shift in the pecking order, it will be effectively just a check who has been able to add more performance within the same time frame.

“And we also have some performance to recover if we look at Mercedes, and to some extent Ferrari as well. But we are quite happy with the development that we’ve been able to manage in the background. So hopefully we should be able to see a slightly more competitive MCL40 in Miami and then in Canada, considering that the last race was already a decent competitive performance in Japan. So we definitely look forward to the next races.”

With McLaren being a Mercedes customer team, Stella acknowledged that the deficit to Mercedes from a power unit perspective has been covered. He explained:

“In terms of working together with HPP and even in terms of developing the simulation tools together with HPP, we have made a significant step forward compared to where we were in Australia. So I think as a team we are now much more prepared.

“And while at the start of the season a deficit might have existed for the natural consequence of being a customer team when the programming was so pushed – also from a power unit point of view – and that was OK and that was something that we were ready to accept, and we processed very constructively together with HPP. But now later in the season I think we have filled this gap, and we should have all the tools that are required to extract the most out of the power unit.”