Does McLaren have a chance to challenge Red Bull for the win? Stella believes his team has the key tools to do so

At the start of this season it looked truly disastrous, McLaren already looked like they were going to write this season off at the pre-season show. But now it is said to be ready to challenge Red Bull for the win.

Remember at the start of the season when McLaren drivers were at the tail end of the grid in the Bahrain Grand Prix?

That time is now forgotten, for since the Red Bull Ring, the British team has deployed countless upgrades that have worked to fantastic effect. In today’s world of Formula One, McLaren has taken a truly gigantic step forward.

McLaren’s amazing work was crowned in the recent Japanese Grand Prix when Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri claimed a double podium. That’s second and third place. And in the recent Qatar Grand Prix, not only did they repeat that result, Piastri even won Saturday’s sprint!

A team that was one of the absolute weakest at the start of the season has become an elite team that even has the chops to chase Max Verstappen for the top spot in the next grand prix.

But beyond the current season, McLaren is also focused on developing the car for next year. The Woking-based stable would understandably like to stabilise at the top of the grid and challenge Red Bull for the win. In addition, Andrea Stella believes that McLaren now finally has the necessary tools.

Development for next year, confidence in the concept…

That’s what current team boss Andrea Stella has been talking about. Needless to say, McLaren has recently finally completed a state-of-the-art wind tunnel, which will also help it significantly in the development of the car for 2023.

“The work we’ve done has given us a decent level of confidence in our concept because we’ve seen in our development tools that things are starting to correlate – particularly between the wind tunnel and CFD,” explains the McLaren boss.

“We will now spend weeks and weeks developing the car in preparation for next year. We won’t be bringing many upgrades for this year to try and address the balance in the car’s set-up,” said Stella, whose words were also quoted by Racing News 365.

“Most of them will come on the car for next year. But we’ll have to wait until February to really see what kind of progress we’ve made,” he added.

Source: F1, Racing News 365