McLaren F1 team principal Andreas Seidl says he is still feeling the long-term effects of brake problems early in the season in his fight once morest the Alpine F1 team.
McLaren faces a heated battle with Alpine F1 team for the best-of-the-rest 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 bring a significant floor update to the next round F1 Singapore GP, and it looks like it wants to win the ranking 4th.
Meanwhile, McLaren admits it paid the price for a difficult start to 2022. In the season-opening F1 Bahrain Grand Prix, it took him some time to overcome the brake overheating problem he faced in pre-season testing, leaving him near the back of the pack. The effort needed to fix this problem had to divert resources away from other performance areas of the car, which had bad consequences in terms of development pushes throughout the season.
Asked if the effects of the brake problem might 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 time of 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 lingering effects of what happened in the early races, Andreas Seidl praised how McLaren overcame the problem, ultimately making some progress in addressing the car’s weaknesses. I feel that
“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 difficult start because of the brakes at the Bahrain test. In this era of F1. In terms of getting in, it simply fell behind in terms of starting performance.”
“Definitely we weren’t where we wanted to be, but at the same time I think the team has responded strongly throughout the season and come 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 might have been just as bad. .
“Considering that, looking at the progress we can achieve with the package we brought in, the correlation was good, actually positive,” 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.”
