McLaren racing director Eric Boullier remains confident that McLaren can still make progress in 2014 – and admits that the Austrian and British events will be a good barometer, following the atypical races in Monaco and Canada.
Although McLaren failed to scored in Spain Boullier says that upgrades brought to the car did work as planned.
“Following all of our data analysis all the upgrades actually worked,” he said today. “Except one part in high speed corners, to be totally fair, but the car was not worse. We know this. We are now in the rebuilding process of the aero department, we have the car we have, so we need to so far develop the car like it is. We have seen very, very significant progress in the wind tunnel in the last few weeks, so I think we need to just understand where we are, where we want to go, and this is now where we are just defining.
“To be honest we had to go through very much in detail to understand why we had an underperforming car and how to develop the car, and even questioning how we bring concepts and how we develop the car on the daily basis. Now we’ve put everything in place. It’s true that we’re starting from quite far, to be honest, but we have a very good rate per week, if you want, in terms of development.
“Monaco and Canada are a bit special, because they have a special track layout. I think the real question about how capable we are to catch up and how fast we will be catching up will be from Austria/Silverstone. I am not saying that we will win Silverstone, I’m, just saying we will know more about our capability to catch up at these races.”
Regarding which is the next two races might help McLaren he said: “I should say with more guarantee Canada, but actually Monaco could also be not bad for us. The reason is because our car is well balanced in low speed corners, and very driveable, so Monaco could be – could be I said – less hurting us.”
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