McLaren's Testing Issues Delayed Upgrade

McLaren have admitted the issues they experienced during pre-season testing required them to delay upgrades.

McLaren only raced with part of their upgrade in Melbourne which includes new brake ducts and floor modifications.

In Bahrain, the team will introduce the rest of the planned updates. This will be a major bargeboard update as they hope to improve on a 5th and 9th place finish.

Eric Boullier explains: “We were obviously not prepared for Barcelona and I’m glad we fixed the reliability issues for the weekend.

“But during the last few weeks, we spent our energy fixing the reliability issues and not bringing the upgrade faster to the track.

“So we are going to have another batch coming in Bahrain which should have been in Australia.”

The managing director remains confident that the car will continue to develop as the season progresses.

“Clearly we have to work on these kinds of characteristics, so there will be some fixes I hope in the course of the next few races.

“But we are happy with the correlation, so we have not lost what was one of the strengths of the McLaren last year.

“That’s one of the reasons I guess why Fernando was supportive and happy this weekend because we have lots of things coming that have been signed off already.

“We are now going to push to make sure we can bring things as soon as possible.”

The McLaren mechanics had a much easier weekend in Australia only experiencing one issue.

“It was nothing at all, actually.

“It was a new air duct, we changed the material and in this material, there was some flammable tissue.

“So every time the car came back to the garage there was a little flame and we didn’t know where it was coming from until all the papers were burned then it was finished.”