McLaren boss thinks team would have matched Red Bull if they had Renault power

McLaren's F1 executive director Zak Brown believes that his team would have matched or bettered the performance of Red Bull in the team rankings last season if they had access to Renault engine units instead of their continuously unreliable Honda parts.

The Woking-based outfit have not even secured as much as a podium place since 2014, and the lack of success has largely been attributed to their partnership with Honda which has now been terminated. The Japanese manufacturer provided parts for McLaren that were perennially unreliable.

McLaren will now be using Renault engines, and Brown thinks if they had them last year they would have performed as well as Red Bull, who have used Renault for a while now.

“You can quite easily look with GPS, and all the teams can do the same thing,” he told RACER.

“In 2017 – because next season nobody knows – if we had the Renault power plant in there we would have been there or thereabouts with Red Bull. Some races ahead of them, some races behind them, but we would have been around there.”

Even though Brown is confident that Renault would have improved McLaren's fortunes last season, he stopped short of providing any estimations of how the new partnership would perform for the upcoming 2018 campaign.

“You ultimately don’t know what the car will do when it speeds up," he continued.

"You can have a general idea, but we’re not working our aero as hard coming into Turn 1 because we’re not coming in at the same top speed, so we know if we would have had X more top speed but that’s all by the engine, and then you don’t know exactly what you’d have done under braking and turn-in because you’d have been working the downforce differently."