“Not as bad as it looks, not as good as it should be,” Zak Brown sums up McLaren’s start to the F1 2023 season
McLaren's Zak Brown have still gotten his hopes high about his team's performance despite the results claiming otherwise.
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A couple of years ago, in the 2020 Formula One Championship, McLaren had amassed a whopping 202 points by the end of the season and usurped Ferrari to get the third position in the World Rankings. Fast forward to the current situation, the Woking-based team has gotten only 14 points after 5 races, and is down in the fifth place in the points table. At the start of the year, the MCL60 was being claimed as a worthy challenger to give the Ferrari, Mercedes and Red Bull machines a run for their money, but unfortunately, the woes began for Zak Brown‘s team from the moment they raced at the season opener in Bahrain.
After the poor results from last year, McLaren had dropped Daniel Ricciardo prematurely and taken up Oscar Piastri in his place. But in Bahrain, Piastri failed to even finish his race and Lando Norris ended his run in the last position on the grid. Things hardly improved for the better at the Saudi Arabian GP as Lando came 17th and Piastri finished two places ahead of his teammate. In Australia, both the young races took advantage of the ruckus on the grid and finished 6th and 8th, thus ending McLaren’s only race till now where both the drivers have managed to scrounge some points.
In Baku, the papaya squad introduced new floor upgrades which led Norris to score two points with a P9 finish but Oscar Piastri failed to get into the top 10. Miami was a disaster once again as both the drivers were out of the run in Q1 on Saturday, and ended the Main Race in the 17th and 19th positions. Thus, this disappointing performance has raised many eyebrows as fans believe McLaren are lacking some serious pace as opposed to their competitors. But in Team Boss Zak Brown’s words, “Well, it’s a bit early. Yeah, as I explained, it’s not as bad as it looks, but it’s not as good as it should be.”
Zak Brown directly blames Alpine’s Pierre Gasly for sabotaging Oscar Piastri’s Jeddah race
McLaren has had some uncharacteristically unfortunate results in this new 2023 F1 season as they have scored points at only two races out of the five Grands Prix till now. But Zak Brown has laid out reasons for their failure to score at every single point as he said, “[In] Bahrain, we were definitely off the pace. In Saudi, I think we would have had two cars in Q3. Lando made an uncharacteristic, very small mistake, and then Oscar got run over by Otmar [Szafnauer]’s driver. So I don’t think we were able to really race properly in Saudi. And Baku, we were much improved, and Australia was decent.“
While Zak Brown continues to be optimistic about his team’s results, fans believe McLaren have hit a new low. There have been several changes in the team this year, including Daniel Ricciardo’s dismissal and Andreas Seidl’s exit. Some have questioned Team Principal Andrea Stella’s approach since McLaren does not seem to show much improvement even after their upgrades. Now, it remains to be seen whether the team is able to pick themselves up and deliver better performance in the upcoming races in Monaco and Barcelona.
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Riddhi Mondal
(1821 Articles Published)