“Can McLaren do an Aston?” We posed that question on the cover of our 18 May 2023 issue. Now, entering 2024, we’re asking whether the orange team might soon do rather better: could it even rival Red Bull in the upcoming Formula 1 campaign?
That the question can be posed at all says so much about the 2023 season just gone for McLaren. The team had a reliability nightmare across Bahrain testing and the opening race there last year, and a car that struggled to escape Q1 in many of the early rounds, yet ended up fourth in the constructors’ championship. It eventually finished comfortably clear of Aston Martin, which had made its own big jump over the winter and was significantly more competitive in the early events.
“We’re sitting in fourth in the championship because we’ve been a blend of ninth quickest to second quickest, so we’ve averaged into where we are,” points out McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown. “But I think we ended stronger than where we anticipated. That gives us a lot of energy and excitement in the off-season.”
Indeed, McLaren scored 215 points through the final half of last year’s 22-race season. Other than Red Bull, only Ferrari (with 239 points) headed it over the final 11 events of 2023. Mercedes, which ended up second in the constructors’ results, brought in just 186. It can be argued that, without McLaren’s slow start in 2023, things might have ended up being a lot closer between these three squads, albeit far off Red Bull.
McLaren went from “zero to hero” and “a terrible start to the year”, because “we called our shot”, reckons Brown. This meant weathering the storm of those tricky opening races. It’s worth remembering how even in May’s Miami
