McLaren sets off pursuit of Red Bull Racing with ten updates

McLaren went through a spectacular development in 2023. The team performed lousy in the first few races, but they managed to completely turn the season around with several updates from the Austrian Grand Prix onwards. 2024 has started fine for McLaren, but with ten updates in Miami, McLaren seems intent on taking another big step forward.

Brown said in the team principal press conference on Friday that Lando Norris will drive the full new package in Miami, while Oscar Piastri has some of the new updates. ''The sprint weekends are a bit trickier to introduce updates, but we decided to split them up so we can learn more. Oscar will have the full package at his disposal in Imola.''

McLaren aims to attack Red Bull

''Lap time'', gave Brown as an obvious answer when asked what he hopes to achieve with the mountain of updates the team has brought along. The big question is, can it now compete with Red Bull Racing? ''That might be asking a bit too much. In any case, our hope is that it will bring us closer to Red Bull.''

In the sprint shootout, the McLaren drivers' performance was somewhat disappointing. On medium tyres, the two drivers were consistently up front, but on the soft tyre in SQ3, Norris (not for the first time) wasted his qualifying lap. As a result, the Briton will start from P9 during the sprint race. Piastri, without all the updates on his car, finished sixth in sprint qualifying.