McLaren appeared to hit the ground running in early 2022 pre-season testing with the fastest lap of all the new cars in Barcelona. The team’s spirit was therefore high before the next test in Bahrain. However, the second test session was not the trial McLaren needed to get mileage under the car’s belt, or to prove the pace delivered in the previous session.
Following the Bahrain test, James Key, McLaren’s technical director, said, ‘it was a storm of so many different factors. We’d had a brake issue in the [Barcelona] test just a week before, and Bahrain was the closest winter test ever to the first race. There was very little time to react to that, but it also meant that, testing-wise, we got very little done, which put us back in terms of learning more about this new car.
‘Consequently, we didn’t get three days [of testing] and, what’s more, everyone else did. So we went into the [first] race very much on the back foot.’
That pre-season testing set the scene for the rollercoaster of a race season to follow and, with 22 races completed for the season, on 15 occasions at least one McLaren achieved no points. Surprisingly, despite all this, the team finished fifth in the Constructors’ Championship.
Conservative start
The MCL36 started 2022 in a relatively conventional way, with a conservative design and layout, despite the new chassis regulations allowing for many design philosophies to be used.
On making the most of the new rules in 2022, Key says, ‘my
