Mercedes PU switch forced "intense" McLaren upgrades

McLaren team principal Andreas Seidl has said the switch from Renault to Mercedes power for the coming season put "intense pressure" on the team last year.

In a bid to reduce costs, Formula 1 pushed back planned aerodynamic changes by a year to 2022, with teams agreeing to run largely unchanged machinery from 2020 for a second year.

A September date was set for the homologation of 2021 designs and, with McLaren spending its development tokens on adapting the MCL35 to fit the Mercedes power unit, the team was essentially required to complete its winter development several months early.

A raft of upgrades appeared on the car from the Eifel Grand Prix onwards, with McLaren focussing on the car in stages, working from the nose back.

“In terms of the development, I wouldn’t say it was always small updates [through 2020]," he said. "If you look at the change we did on the nose-box that was a big change in terms of the aerodynamic concept of the car.

“But with the restrictions we have over winter, not having any tokens because of the engine change, we obviously had to push flat-out in bringing updates we would have probably done over the winter forward, which created intense pressure on the development guys back home and on the production team back home.

“But I’m very happy with all the updates we could bring to the track. Of course, the introduction wasn’t always straightforward because we had to balance also the running time we have available during the race weekend on how much time can we actually spend to explore these updates properly compared to simply making sure you get it as prepared as possible for the rest of the race weekend with the tyre testing and so on, on Fridays on short runs."

The step made by McLaren between the 2019 and 2020 seasons was considerable and enabled the team to claim victory in a season-long tussle with Racing Point and Renault over third place in the constructors' standings.

With the likelihood of a similar jump being made reduced by the lack of development tokens, Seidl is hoping the Mercedes engines pay dividends.

“I was very happy with the step we could make with the car over winter and then with the step we could make with performance throughout the season," he explained. "It shows that our development process under the leadership of James [Key - technical director] is working well.

“We had good correlation with him, obviously back home, in the CFD wind tunnel and on the track and we simply [need to] see now what is possible for next year because we are looking forward to getting the Mercedes power unit into the car.

"But at the same time we have this restriction of not having tokens so, obviously, we need to see how much of a step everyone else can make with having this freedom on the cost side, and we obviously hope we will make a small step as well with the Mercedes power unit.”

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