Rapid upgrades are key to McLaren F1 advancement

McLaren enjoyed a strong 2020 season with both Carlos Sainz and Lando Norris on the podium and a regular factor in the upper midfield.

The pair delivered a consistent score to hold off the naturally faster Racing Point cars in the battle for third place.

Team boss Seidl believes a key factor in McLaren’s progress in 2020 is that his technical team, led by technical director James Key, had to advance several developments of the car.

In 2021, the Woking team will switch from Renault to Mercedes engines, which means that the team will have to spend both development tokens in order to adapt the new unit to its current chassis.

As this change in the off-season – apart from aerodynamics – left little room for development, some of the planned upgrades for 2021 were brought forward for the season as part of an ambitious development program.

“With the restrictions that we have over the winter because we don’t have tokens because of the engine, we of course had to work flat out to bring it [forward] Updates that we would probably have made over the winter, “explained Seidl.

“That put a lot of pressure on the developers and the production team at home.

“I’m very happy with the step we were able to take with the car over the winter and then with the overall step that we were able to take with the performance throughout the season.

“It shows that our development process under James’ direction is working well, with a good correlation between what we see at home in the CFD and wind tunnel and rail sectors.

“As for developments, I wouldn’t say that it was always small updates. If you look at the change to the bug box, it was a big change in the aerodynamic concept of the car.”

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Seidl also praised his team’s running of the race and the excellent reliability of the 2020 car, which allowed Sainz and Norris to regularly score points with the MCL35.

“I think we had a competitive car all season, also a bit of an all-rounder.

“We were always somehow able to get into Q3 for most of the time and always started the races in positions where we could fight for good points.

“Then of course we had a great team out here on the track, which was simply very good in terms of running the race, qualifying and strategy.

“The reliability on the vehicle side was excellent, we didn’t have a single DNF this year, which is a big step forward compared to last year. And then the strategy team did a great job on the racing Sundays.

“And last but not least, our two drivers did a sensational job again, similar to last year. They earned us all these great points.”