McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella says McLaren is targeting to compete for wins again in Formula 1 during the 2025 season.
After a sluggish start to this year with a hugely underdeveloped package, the introduction of an extensive upgrade package to its MCL60 car saw Lando Norris take fourth in the Austrian Grand Prix.
With more new parts fitted at Silverstone last weekend, both McLaren drivers classified inside the top four, with Norris securing McLaren’s first podium of the year in second.
Despite McLaren’s remarkable recent improvement, Stella is remaining grounded and insists the Woking squad must ensure it keeps progressing in every department.
“By nature, I don’t necessarily think about the destination, I think about what do we need to put in place to keep improving,” he said. “The way we discuss it internally is to let the results come to us.
“We just have to focus on what do we need to do on a technical level, at [a] sporting level, financial level, that is our mindset.
“So if we take the technical level and performance, we just have to keep delivering upgrades to the car. Then sometimes you find surprises, like these upgrades that we took to Austria and here, numerically we weren’t expecting this improvement from a lap time point of view.
“So we remain focus on delivering upgrades to the car, which means designing, conceiving them, producing them and logistics and so on. Then we will see later on where we are in the journey.”
While Red Bull’s dominance of 2023 continued with an 11th successive win at the British Grand Prix, McLaren became the fourth different team in the past four races to trail the reigning champions.
Although Norris’ second place marked McLaren’s first top-three race finish since April 2022, Stella proclaims the British side’s approach will not change despite its rapid gains.
The Italian, 52, also outlines that McLaren aims to continue competing for podiums for the remainder of this year and 2024 before contesting race victories in 2025.
“While you can have targets as an element of discussion, it doesn’t necessarily change our approach,” he explained.
“Our approach was always going to be to push as hard as possible with development, but with a logic and clear direction and then we will see where we end up.
“Once we started to develop the car we saw that the rate of development meant or reasonable expectation was that by the end of the season we could have fought with the four quickest teams.
“That’s what we thought was possible, so it is in a way a bit of a surprise that we find ourselves in this position now, but we will see how things unfold later.
“Our expectation is for McLaren to compete for podiums in the future, next season, and for victories in the following season. This is the long-term vision, but you don’t deliver based on visions, you deliver based on the facts that you actually bring to the car and that’s our focus.”
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