Zak Brown says he wants to stay from any prediction for McLaren for the 2019 F1 season after the team’s repeated failures despite the high expectations.
With the history of McLaren as a title-winning outfit, its been a decade now since it last won the F1 constructors’ championship, while it has also been seven years since it last won a grand prix race, back in 2012.
The year 2012 was also the last time when the team put itself in title contention as since 2013, its best result is only fifth place. When joining hands with Honda in 2015, the idea was to re-create the historic moments it shared when it won titles together.
The predictions were always high each year but the results never came. The partnership then broke as McLaren then joined hands with Renault for the first time in 2018 with renewed motivation of a better result.
However, the season was another trouble which forced them to make several management changes along with a brand new driver line-up for 2019 after Fernando Alonso decided to move away and the team did not to renew with Stoffel Vandoorne.
With one season done with Renault, when asked by FormulaRapida.net as to what will be the team’s aim for the 2019 season after the slight improvement shown in 2018 from last year, Brown didn’t want to chalk out any predictions.
“I think we want to stay away from predictions which is something that has got us in trouble in the past,” he said. “What I can say is that this has been a very disappointing year and we’re anticipating and expecting to move forward.
“You don’t quite know what the competition is going to do. There’s a decent amount of new development with the aero [rules] which hopefully gives us a chance and a bit of a reset because we need to get it right this time.
“So we’re just hoping to be much more competitive. I think we’re now on the road to recovery as I tell the men and women at McLaren. Development is going well – teamwork, collaboration, communication, responsibilities – all those things that we fell short of are now going well.
“But until that race car hits the track that’s the ultimate measurement and that’s when everyone will be able to visibly see what type of improvement over the winter but I certainly think this year is a low spot and this era is a low spot in McLaren history.
“We are working hard to be on the road to recovery now. But it takes some time.” In overall terms, it has been a disappointment for McLaren despite the positive promises when they ended their relation with Honda and joined hands with Renault.
But the constant changes at the management level somewhat disrupted the whole environment as also admitted by Brown. “Ultimately what got us here this year started five years ago,” he said. “So this year’s problem is years in the works.
“My summary of that is that we’ve had a lack of consistent leadership. I don’t point the fingers at any one individual. A lack of focus because of all the activities that were going on, from the boardroom down — buyouts, merging of companies, team principals in, team principals out, CEOs in, CEOs out — so it was just a constant revolving kind of lack of focus and I think that’s what created the issue.
“And then what fell out of that is that people didn’t have clear goals and accountability, responsibility, and so ultimately that’s what produced a poor race car this year. It was kind of our structure, our organization. The individual people are extremely talented.
“We’ve got multiple world championships, we’ve got over 100 people that have been here for over 20 years. So they haven’t forgotten how to win we just didn’t have the right infrastructure in place, and that’s what we’ve set out to fix.”
[Read Also: Brown on Renault’s progress report]