McLaren: "It's by far the best start in years"

According to British stable manager Andreas Seidl, it is a long time since McLaren had had such a successful first week of winter testing.
The confirmation season is often feared, it is the task that awaits McLaren in 2020 after winning fourth place in the constructors' championship last year. The Woking team insists on the realism which it must display in its short-term objectives and regularly refuses any excitement, nevertheless the first week of winter tests ended with all the lights green. The essential mission of these first three days in Barcelona was to prioritize reliability: it is accomplished, with 423 laps completed and solid foundations laid for next week.
"To be frank, we are really, really, really happy with how it has gone so far, for various reasons," said Andreas Seidl, who was usually not very quick to make this kind of speech. "Above all, if we take the number of laps and the reliability that we have posted so far, it is by far the best start in years for McLaren in winter testing. It is simply a great reward and a sign for the whole team that the hard work we did last month to get over this milestone pays off. So I'm very happy about that. Regarding the program and the test points, I am also very satisfied that we have already been able to check many boxes on our list. Without any problem of reliability, we can review the traffic plan every day, as planned. "

New parts "continuously"

For McLaren, there was no question of looking for the stopwatch this week, as evidenced by the 12th place with the best time achieved by Carlos Sainz over three days. "We are focusing on ourselves, not on the lap times," insists Andreas Seidl. "We are also continually bringing parts to the car, with late deliveries from the factory. It's great to see the dynamics we have. As you have seen, for example, we tested a new front wing on [Friday] morning. So far, the car is behaving as we expected. It's great to see this correlation. I'm very satisfied. "

Starting next week, thanks to these solid foundations, McLaren will introduce further developments on the MCL35 in order to prepare as well as possible for the first Grand Prix of the season. "We have a program that plans to continually bring parts to the circuit, including next week to find more performance on the car before going to Melbourne," said the manager of the British team. "Regarding performance, it is still early. We are satisfied with what we have so far. As I said before, the car is working as expected, so we have no question marks at its topic."