McLaren Racing enters yet another crucial F1 season in 2019 where its Sporting Director Gil de Ferran states that the team has not reached ‘nirvana’ level yet.
De Ferran was brought into the team when it went through a management overall in the middle of the 2018 F1 season as its new Sporting Director alongside McLaren head Zak Brown but he worked on several levels as the team pushed to hire more people.
Now with ex-Porsche’s Andreas Seidl is to come in, de Ferran will finally get to do the work he was supposed to do from the start, which is to look after the overall McLaren Racing’s racing programme under Brown’s leadership.
But for now, he had to see-through the 2019 F1 programme with the two Barcelona pre-season tests where the Woking-based outfit finally managed to rack up solid mileage after troubles in the last few years to even get a decent number onboard.
Even with some better running where both McLaren drivers Carlos Sainz and Lando Norris managed to top the standings, de Ferran is not convinced of their actual performance against its rivals. He thinks that the team certainly isn’t at the ‘nirvana’ level yet.
“[My focus is] to understand the team better, to make sure that we take the talent that already exists in the team and to make sure that we work more efficiently, that we deliver more, improve communications, and we work better together as a team, part of this was some re-organisation.
“We added some people in the team in the middle of last year, we re-organised a few things internally, there are more people coming. So, we have been walking down this road. I was asked what’s the thing you are most proud of in the tests? I am not sure it is about the test but I feel the team is working better together.
“Are we at nirvana level yet? No. We can always improve on many counts, and I think we continue to walk down that road. My focus is exactly that – to make sure that the team is organised in the right way, make sure that we’re having the right conversations.
“And also that the right people are focused on the right things, and to try to influence the culture of this team in the best way that I can. I think we just have to keep walking the road and results over time will eventually tell how well we’re doing as a team.
“One thing that is great about motor racing is you get a test [grand prix weekend], every two weeks on how well we are doing. If we are on a good path, then I guess we are doing OK,” he explained to the media including FormulaRapida.net.
De Ferran had philosophical touch to his words. Coming to the performance side, it was the usual answer with no idea as to where McLaren stands considering the test had teams on different programmes. But he was happy with how the team worked overall.
“We came here with a plan and we accomplished a lot of things,” he said. “We came here wanting to do a lot of laps, put in a lot of miles to ensure reliability and sign off some systems and I think we ticked the box.
“We came here wanting to understand our new car and make sure it was doing everything it said on the tin and we accomplished that. We gained a lot of information about the cars and the new Pirelli tyres.
“And one of the most important things in the test was that we wanted to integrate our new drivers well into the team and to prepare them the best we could for the season and I think we ticked that box too.
“On those three categories, do we get a 10 out of 10? I don’t think as I wouldn’t give ourselves that, but I think we got a decent score.” The team certainly did well on those accounts but the performance still is a question mark as we head into F1 2019.
Additional reporting by Arnau Vinals
Check out how the teams stacked up laps in two Barcelona tests