The McLaren team were once a championship-winning side, but have fallen by the wayside. The good news is that the Woking outfit is slowly and steadily taking steps to get back to where it belongs. With a Mercedes reunion on the horizon, the outfit needs to accommodate the engine in 2021.
Recently, McLaren CEO Zak Brown spoke about the team’s progress so far. He believes that McLaren can compete with the Big 3 by 2022. Under normal circumstances, F1 would have introduced several technical regulations for the 2021 season. However, the COVID-19 crisis has forced the sport to put it on hold.
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As a result, all the teams have design their brand new 2022 challengers with a budget cap of $145 million. This spells good news for the midfield teams because the top team will not be allowed to splurge and gain an advantage.
Can McLaren return to where it belongs?
“2022 is what I’m most excited about,” he told Autoweek. “Not that I want to skip over 2021 — I’m very excited about those (races) — but I think ’22 is when I hope the conversation turns more to who’s going to be our biggest competitor next.
He revealed that the team’s biggest rivals will be Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull. Clearly, Zak Brown is confident that the Woking squad can begin “annoying them more often.”
However McLaren needs to focus on completing whatever is left of the 2020 F1 season and look ahead to 2021. Admittedly, 2021 may be a difficult season since this will be the first season back with Mercedes engines. Switching to a new engine supplier could potentially set the team back for a brief spell.
“It’s gonna be a bit tricky for us, we’re the only one (changing engines),” Brown explained. “So the cars have been, for the most part, frozen.We’re going to have a token system for upgrades. You’re going to get a limited amount of upgrades”
“We’ve had to use some of those tokens to modify the chassis to install the engine, which is a bit of a bummer because the modifications aren’t necessarily for performance.”
