McLaren might have only completed three laps during their first public test day with the new McLaren-Honda MP4-29H/1X1, but racing director Eric Boullier is already targeting race wins.
The Frenchman explained that electrical problems and checks in the morning meant they had to postpone their programme until the afternoon, but added that delays were expected as seen during pre-season testing this year when Mercedes, Renault and Ferrari were getting to grips with their new power units.
“First, we obviously had a plan that we are already modifying three times this morning! There is obviously a lot of system checks, which means you go run by run,” said Boullier.
“Short runs first, it’s not about chassis, tyres or anything like this. It’s not about anything else but taking care of different parts of the engine, reliability, energy recovery and checking every code on everything we can.”
The aim for Wednesday is to complete more laps before turning the power up a little, but he warned that they wouldn’t be pushing for a competitive lap time.
“It’s going to take us about maybe ten runs to go through before we go into another phase, which is putting a longer run to see if there is no default value or anything going wrong after three laps.
“That is going to be the plan and to gradually try to charge more the engine and try to push to, maybe not the limit in these two days, but put more on the electrical package and recovery trying to see if we can go through the mileage and all the runs. At the end we will definitely not try to set a lap time because we are not working at all on the car, it’s to try to push the engine and the recovery system.”
When asked about McLaren-Honda’s objectives for 2015, Boullier didn’t shy away from demanding immediate results.
“We all want to go into Melbourne thinking we can win the race,” Boullier added. “I know we can dream, but we are pushing to have this target because it’s the only way for us to deliver what we want.”
Discussion about this post