McLaren still aiming to be on podium from next year despite recent step forward

McLaren’s expectation is to fight regularly for podiums in 2024 and for victories a year later despite recent steps forward in car performance, according to team principal Andrea Stella.

The strong showing at Silverstone has raised expectations around McLaren as the team made a major lap time gain over the past two races thanks to an upgrade package that will see further additions in Hungary this weekend. However, Stella says the team’s aims are not going to change instantly as a result, with the main lesson from the latest update being that it shows McLaren is doing the right things at the moment.

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“While you can have targets as an element of discussion, it doesn’t necessarily change our approach,” Stella said. “Our approach was always going to be to push as hard as possible with development, but with a logic and clear direction and then we will see where we end up.

“Once we started to develop the car we saw that the rate of development meant or reasonable expectation was that by the end of the season we could have fought with the four quickest teams. That’s what we thought was possible, so it is in a way a bit of a surprise that we find ourselves in this position now, but we will see how things unfold later.

“Our expectation is for McLaren to compete for podiums in the future, next season, and for victories in the following season. This is the long-term vision, but you don’t deliver based on visions, you deliver based on the facts that you actually bring to the car and that’s our focus.”

And Stella believes it is better for McLaren to be fully invested on where its next step is going to come from, rather than letting that ultimate aim of winning races again become a distraction.

“By nature I don’t necessarily think about the destination, I think about what do we need to put in place to keep improving. The way we discuss it internally is to let the results come to us. We just have to focus on what do we need to do on a technical level, at sporting level, financial level, that is our mindset.

“So if we take the technical level and performance, we just have to keep delivering upgrades to the car. Then sometimes you find surprises, like these upgrades that we took to Austria and (Silverstone), numerically we weren’t expecting this improvement from a lap time point of view.

“So we remain focused on delivering upgrades to the car, which means designing them, conceiving them, producing them and logistics and so on. Then we will see later on where we are in the journey.”