McLaren 'didn't spend a minute' worrying about DAS

McLaren

McLaren 'didn't spend a minute' worrying about DAS

DAS was never a consideration for the MCL35

Sam Hall

Tuesday 7 July 2020 18:00

McLaren team principal Andreas Seidl has said the Formula 1 team never considered developing a DAS system of its own.

Mercedes caused a storm when publicly revealing the dual-axis steering device during pre-season testing at Barcelona in February.

Questions remain unanswered as to the primary purpose of the system but, after surviving a protest from Red Bull at the Austrian Grand Prix, it is here to stay - until regulation changes prevent its use in 2021 at least.

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As to whether McLaren considered the possibility of creating its own system, Seidl said: "To be honest, we didn't spend really a lot of time on this topic.

"I didn't spend personally a single minute on it, because we know that inside our team at the moment we have a lot more basic things to sort in order to make the next step as a team.

"There's a lot of different points where we can use our capacities better, and that's why it was never, I would say, a direction that we wanted to follow after we saw it the first time on track from Mercedes, especially knowing it is banned for next year."

McLaren scored a second podium in three races at the Austrian Grand prix with Lando Norris making his first trip to the F1 podium, becoming the youngest British driver in F1 history to do so.

A highly congested midfield pack saw different teams in line for a top-three result at different times, with Racing Point, Red Bull and Ferrari all contenders, and with such close competition, Seidl is concentrating solely on his team, and improvements they can make.

He added: "In the end, my job, the job of the McLaren team, is to focus on ourselves.

"We want to make sure that we make the right steps with the car. It's good to see that we have made definitely a good step with the car which confirms we are heading in the right direction."

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