Former McLaren coordinator reveals what's wrong with the former F1 giant

Former McLaren coordinator Jo Ramirez has lamented the British team's poor start to the 2023 season, highlighting their poor development in the preseason as one of the factors.

The iconic team, which finished P5 in 2022, has disappointed everyone with their performance in the season's opening race in Bahrain last week. They failed to register any points as Lando Norris finished last among the running cars with his teammate Oscar Piastri retiring early in the race.

Speaking to AS.com, Ramirez spoke about the progress made by the Woking-based team while also shedding light on how former CEO Ron Dennis used to work. He said:

"It is a pity. They are very slow in development. Even in my day, when we were working on next year's new car, we were always late. Ron Dennis wanted to check everything, down to the smallest detail, and many times the championship started and we were caught with our pants down because we were not prepared."

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"It's so reassuring because we're making progress" - McLaren team boss

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has provided some positive updates regarding the team's new wind tunnel. McLaren have been pinning their hopes of developing a race-winning car on the new machinery for quite some time.

Speaking to Motorsport.com, Stella said:

"We are hopeful to have the car in the wind tunnel, which should be at that stage the new car, in June. The wind tunnel is already commissioned, but there's a process of calibration, and installation of the methodologies like the ones you use to measure the pressure, to measure the velocity field, to measure the forces. All this takes some weeks."

"Hardware-wise it exists, the fan goes on. It's really nice for my office because I can hear it. And it's so reassuring [because] we're making progress, but we can't yet put the car model in there for the relevant tests. On a new wind tunnel you have to use a reference model in one tunnel and in another to see the correlation and repeatability."

The McLaren team principal added:

"We don't plan to do it with the new car model, we want to do it with the old car model, understand more about the new wind tunnel and then deploy the new [2024] car."

It would be interesting to see if McLaren can truly make some progress in the coming months and turn around their 2023 campaign with assistance from their new wind tunnel.