McLaren 'had to pull the handbrake' as it puts a halt on future developments amidst rising inflation in F1

McLaren team principal Andreas Seidl has admitted that the team has been forced to pull the brakes on the development of the MCL36 due to cost cap constraints. Speaking to the media about his team's development plan for their 2022 challenger, Seidl admitted that the most important thing was going to be extracting the maximum performance from the package at hand as there will only be small bits and pieces that will be introduced to the car.

“Hopefully it is not just us who had to pull the handbrake in terms of further developments, due to the restrictions we’re having mainly from the cost cap side. But there are also the restrictions you have nowadays with further limited wind tunnel time, so you really need to be very careful with how you use your wind tunnel time.”

“The main thing at the moment is still to try to unlock more performance from the package we are having. Then we need to see which further, let’s say, small little changes to the car will come throughout the course of the season.”

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The 2022 McLaren MCL36 is more complete as compared to the 2021 McLaren MCL35M

Team principal Andreas Seidl feels that McLaren has been able to make improvements in areas where it was weak last season. The Woking-based outfit struggled a bit to get around the slow-speed sections last season but according to Seidl, there has been an improvement on that front for the team.

The team's erratic performance over different race weekends? Seidl has put that down to the novelty of these new cars as this is the first season with these regulations.

The German said:

“I think we made a good step forward in terms of some of the weaknesses last year, for example in the low speed. I definitely think that the car is now more suitable for all kinds of tracks. But at the same time, probably also, with these cars also being so new, you still see big swings between all the different cars we are battling with from track to track.”

“One weekend you are the third or fourth fastest team, and then the next week you’re suddenly qualifying the seventh-fastest team. Also, if you look at our side, I think the season so far definitely is a bit of an up and down one. Difficult starts for the known reasons and really strong weekends in Melbourne and Imola, then more challenging weekends before the strong Monaco weekend in terms of performance.”

The team is currently leading the midfield pack in the constructors' standings but rivals like Alpine and Alfa Romeo are starting to close up in recent races.