Zak Brown: So far we are one step behind

At a press conference on Friday, the head of McLaren Racing, Zak Brown, admitted that while the team is far from its goal, but he expects serious progress during the season. 

Zak Brown: "It is difficult to assess our competitiveness before the start of the season. We know that we have not achieved some of our goals, and we decided that it is better to admit it.

We, like everyone else, still have a lot to do, but we are optimistic about the future. Obviously, next week we won't be as fast as we would like. It's hard to say where we will end up on the starting field. So far we are one step behind. 

Yesterday was not without "childhood diseases". In the morning, Oscar was working with the settings, which was not easy. Nothing alarming, the usual difficulties on the tests.

Today Lando focused on long series of laps. We are trying to understand the new car, there is still a day and a half of testing ahead, and during the weekend we will search for race settings. 

Last year, due to problems with brakes on tests, we had to stop the development of other nodes and concentrate all our efforts to quickly find a solution. Then we reacted very well. We had about a week to solve the problem – and we coped. Unfortunately, this affected our results in the first half of the season. Therefore, it is especially important to conduct these tests cleanly. 

By the end of the year we want to be in the top four. Last season was a bit disappointing, but our main goal is to return to the top spot, and we know that it takes a little more time.

The entire technological infrastructure is ready or will be ready this year. We have some good developments. But the same can be said about other Formula 1 teams. So we need to pick up the pace”.