McLaren's Zak Brown wants to hit the ground running in Barcelona testing

McLaren boss Zak Brown has bemoaned that the team were forced to focus on reliability issues on their car rather than preparing for the season at testing in Barcelona last year, and is hoping to avoid similar problems to hit the ground running in 2019.

The team's season was derailed before it even got going last year, as they completed the least amount of laps in testing out of the 10 teams on the grid. It would prove to be a sign of things to come, as they stumbled to a sixth-place finish despite lofty pre-campaign ambitions.

Brown wants to avoid a repetition of the issues in Barcelona.

“One of the reasons – not the only reason, but one of the reasons – why we were slower to bring performance is we had reliability issues," the McLaren chief admitted.

“So you roll off the truck in Barcelona and instead of being able to get straight down to performance you’re immediately tackling wheel nut issues, heating issues and you then stop focussing on performance, start focusing on reliability.

“I think the team did a good job to give us reliability coming out of Spain testing to have both cars finish in the points in Australia. It isn’t what it looked like [being] in Spain. So I think we’re in a better place performance-wise and reliability coming into winter testing.”

With Fernando Alonso opting to retire from Formula 1 and Stoffel Vandoorne deemed surplus to requirements, McLaren will have a new driving line-up for 2019, with Carlos Sainz and Lando Norris coming in.

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