Seidl: Happy with McLaren progress but "we still have a long way to go"

McLaren team principal Andreas Seidl has been encouraged by the strong early results of 2020 but admits the team has a long way to go to return to where it wants to be at the front.

McLaren has bounced back from a difficult few years of competing alone at the back of Formula 1 to join the fight for the 'best of the rest' position with Racing Point and Renault.

In 2020, this battle is for third instead of fourth, with Ferrari enduring a difficult campaign and dropping into the fight leaving Mercedes and Red Bull as the two stand out teams at the front.

Asked by GPFans to evaluate McLaren's performance across the opening six grands prix, Seidl answered: “Looking at it overall, these first six races, I’m simply happy that we clearly could make a good step forward with the car from last year.

“It’s encouraging to see when you do the overlays with last year’s car this good step we could make, which is simply confirmation that we are heading in the right direction back home with the development, with the work together between race team and home team etc.

“Also in the way we work together here at the track, I’m very happy, but at the same time there is no reason to get carried away with this, because we know we still have a long way to go.

“We have a clear plan in place of what we are still missing in order to become a better team and that’s what we are working on and results obviously are a great motivation to do that.”

Seidl has openly admitted his team benefited in the opening two races at the Red Bull Ring from other teams failing to maximise their potential, a claim he repeated once again.

He added: “Of course, there have been situations already this year where we could have done better in terms of probably small little gains in terms of strategy calls, pit stops and so on, but that’s normal and that’s part of the game.

“It’s important to go away from each race and simply analyse what we could have done better without also any finger pointing if something goes wrong but simply also use this as an opportunity to simply do better next time.

“That is what we are like within the team. We have this spirit that we see that actually has a chance to get better as a team.

“We also have to say in the end, especially the first two races in Austria, although especially the first one where we scored the podium, we also benefited from the issues of other car or teams that simply didn’t finish the race or didn’t show the full potential that their cars had sometimes you’re in the plus, sometimes you’re in the minus."

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