McLaren’s Andreas Seidl: Upgrades for Spain brought “a step forward in terms of performance”

McLaren F1 Team’s Lando Norris finished eighth at the Spanish Grand Prix, having moved up from eleventh, while Daniel Ricciardo was unable to find the pace needed to hold onto his starting position of ninth, and ended up finishing twelfth. 

Principal Andreas Seidl was pleased with the points result in the “challenging” Barcelona conditions and said that the team will work to understand the issues that caused Ricciardo to struggle. 

“It was a long and challenging Spanish Grand Prix under very hot conditions. Lando together with the team maximised everything we had in our hands today and finished in P8. On Daniel’s side unfortunately, after getting into Q3 yesterday, we were struggling a lot with the rear of the car whenever we tried to push more, and went backwards in the race finishing in P12. We have some homework to do over the next couple of days to understand why.”

Seidl was proud of Norris for pushing through the weekend and achieving a great result in spite of his not feeling well, and hopes he will be better in time for the Monaco Grand Prix.

“Lando did not feel well all weekend but showed great fighting spirit battling it through and bringing home some points for the team. We wish him a speedy recovery now in the next few days and will hopefully have him back at full energy in Monaco in a couple of days.”

Seidl said that the upgrades that the team brought to Spain allowed them to improve their performance, but the team will still need to put in effort to “optimise” the package and remain fourth in the constructors’ standings. The team has fifty points thus far, with Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN just eleven points behind. 

“The entire team here at the track and back home did a great job in the recent weeks and days to bring all the upgrades to the car this weekend and race it on both cars. This allowed us to make a step forward in terms of performance and it worked as expected but we still have a lot of work to do in understanding and optimising it in the weeks ahead. We are up against strong competition and must keep working hard to improve the car further to stay in the battle for P4 in the constructor championship.”

“My thanks to the whole team here at the track and back at the factory, together with our colleagues at Mercedes HPP for their efforts over the weekend and for their incredible work to bring the upgrade. We keep pushing ahead and go to Monaco.”