McLaren will not "get carried away" in fight for third - Seidl

McLaren team principal Andreas Seidl has warned that McLaren will "not get carried away" despite holding the advantage in the fight for third with just two races remaining of the season.

Racing Point arrived in Bahrain third and with a four-point margin over McLaren, but a double retirement dropped the Silverstone-based team to fourth in the constructors' standings.

With Lando Norris finishing fourth and Carlos Sainz fifth, McLaren claimed 22 points, its third-largest haul of the season after the 26 points from Austria and 30 from Italy, to climb past Racing Point and establish a 17 point gap in its favour.

"Obviously, the outcome [in Bahrian] was great for us, for this battle in the constructors' championship," Seidl said.

"At the same time, we are also aware that we have benefited from bad luck that Checo [Perez] had. We also had a great race and it is simply part of the competition we are in. It is important to not get carried away with the result.

"One bad race, a DNF and it can switch back quickly again. It is important as a team, encouraging to see the car is performing like that. It seems that the upgrades we have brought over the last four-or-five races, we can see the benefits of them which is great and a great reward also for everyone back home who is involved with the developments."

Seidl has repeatedly on numerous occasions it is his belief McLaren has the fifth fastest car, but that his team is the strongest when it comes to maximising results.

With this in mind, he added: "It is important we stay focused on ourselves.

"It is important we keep working hard to make sure the reliability stays on the healthy side, important to see if we can still extract a little bit more from the car in terms of performance and it is important to keep doing a good job on the operations side with strategy, pit-stops on Sundays.

"I have a lot of trust in the team along with our two drivers that we have it in our hands if we do our job and that is obviously encouraging.

"At the same time, we know we have strong competitors and we know they can strike back. Obviously, looking forward to these next races, we have our competitive hat on and all we want to do is beat our competitors."

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