The McLaren F1 squad is feeling peppy and positive. It came after the team head Andreas Seidl pronounced to be their best first winter test in quite a while with regards to reliability.

Through the span of three days of pre-season testing this week, Carlos Sainz finished an aggregate of 237 laps of the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya in his time in the MCL35.

Teammate Lando Norris added a further 186 laps to the lap count. Neither one of the drivers experienced any significant reliability issues throughout the test. Just Mercedes, Aston Martin Red Bull Racing and Alfa Romeo beat McLaren’s lap count.

McLaren’s 2019 testing weeks in Barcelona additionally proved fruitful ahead of their break-out season. Seidl thinks the first week of the current year’s winter testing has been simply better.

Having just joined the team mid-way through the 2019 season, Seidl was simply a spectator as McLaren F1 battled with pace and unwavering quality during its problematic years with Honda from 2015-18. However, now he has helped build the team.

What Andreas has to say about the progress

“To be honest, we’re really, really, really happy with how it went so far, for various reasons,” he explained.

“First of all, if you look at the number of laps and the reliability we have shown so far, it is by far the best start for many, many years for McLaren going into a winter test,” he said.

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He added “This is a great reward and a sign for the entire team that all the hard work we have put in the last month in order to make this step is paying off. So I’m very happy about that.”

“In terms of programme and test points, I’m also very happy that we could tick off a lot of boxes already of our job list. Without having these reliability [problems] we simply could go through the run plan every day as planned. We focussed on ourselves, not focussed on lap times and so on,” Seidl concluded.