McLaren CEO Zak Brown says “I didn’t feel like we were moving forward” last season as the team have undertaken a sizeable technical restructure.
McLaren sit 10th in the Constructors’ Championship and are without a point so far this season.
Brown said: “Well, I didn’t like our pace of development, if you like, towards the second half of last year. I didn’t feel like we were moving forward.
“You know, you look at Aston [Martin], they’ve done a fantastic job, started at the beginning of the year, not where they finished at the end of the year and clearly they’ve just continued on in that development path.”
Aston Martin have improved over the winter, escaping from Formula 1’s ultra-competitive midfield and are Red Bull’s closest challengers at the sharp end of the field.
The CEO of McLaren wasn’t satisfied with the Woking-based outfit’s rate of development and understood in pre-season they hadn’t hit their targets.
“And I felt like we were not developing at the pace that we need to, so when we had our team principal change, I asked Andrea to take a look at why and he restructured the department. And that was a work in progress over the winter.
“We knew, as we said at the launch, that we weren’t where we’d want to be at the start of the year.”
Last time out in Saudi Arabia, McLaren suffered poor luck with Oscar Piastri’s front wing causing damage to Lando Norris’ car.
“Obviously Saudi was quite disappointing, because that really wasn’t representative of any sort of pace issue, having one car lose its front wing and take out the other, especially when they weren’t even racing each other, is a bit of bad luck.”
Australia presents the perfect opportunity for McLaren to bounce back from their disappointing start, a track they scored a double points finish at last year.
“And so our season starts here in Australia and I’ve got all the confidence in Andrea, the structure, the people we have, the people that we have coming, that will now be able to continue forward on our journey.”
