Zak Brown admits ‘pointless’ to build up McLaren pre-season expectation

Zak Brown said it would have been “pointless” for McLaren to build up pre-season expectations knowing how far behind their car was.

The 2023 car looked the worst McLaren had produced since the dark times of 2017 but the turnaround has been quite staggering in not only its effectiveness but the speed of it.

Since Austria, McLaren have gone from one of the slowest cars on the grid to in the pack competing behind Red Bull but Brown has revealed why he did not want to talk up the team’s chances heading into the season.

Zak Brown kept lid on McLaren pre-season hype

The start of a new season is usually a time for optimism and wondering what could be but this year, McLaren had a different mindset.

Having hit a speed bump after their solid 2021, the Woking outfit were looking to bounce back with the MCL60 but early indications were the car was well behind their target.

It was for this reason that Brown felt it would have been “pointless” to promise much and deliver little.

“它将是毫无意义的谈话launch, knowing what we were going to see 30 days later, so we were just transparent because our data said we were not where we need to be,” he toldMotorsport.com.

“We knew changes were in the works, and then data was telling us things were going to start looking up in Austria and Silverstone and they have.

“So. that’s given us a lot of confidence that what we’re seeing in data is correlating to the track, whether that’s good data or bad data.”

2023 is not the only difficult season Brown has had to navigate during his McLaren tenure but is thankful it did not hit the lows of 2017.

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“It never went that far. 2017 was here [points to the floor] and 2021 about there [somewhere in the middle],” Brown explained.

“我们从来没有回来。我们刚才打了一个的速度bump and I felt it last year. These are things that I recognised the second half of last year.

“I had some conversations internally about why we’re losing momentum, we’re stagnant, which in Formula 1 meant we’re going backwards.”

Brown acted on this stagnation, sacking technical director James Key and replacing him with the trio of Rob Marshall, Peter Prodromou and David Sanchez.

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