Carlos Sainz says McLaren won’t set any performance goals until they have tested the MCL34 at Barcelona next week.
The Woking-based team had the second slowest car for much of last season but finished sixth in the Constructors Championship, largely thanks to the efforts of Fernando Alonso.
But the double F1 champion has left the team and McLaren have a new line-up of ex-Renault star Sainz and former test and reserve driver Lando Norris.
“We’re in a rebuild process and it’s going to be a journey,” said boss Zak Brown. “Last year we were a bit over-excited about how quickly we would return to the front.
We looked at what went wrong and made a lot of changes, so this is a very important year to show forward progress.”
Sainz says the team must resist the temptation of setting performance goals before they properly get to grips with their new car at pre-season testing in Spain next week.
“It would be a big mistake to set ourselves goals at this point, we have set our goals to be better prepared,” the 24-year-old said. “Hopefully that paid off.
You can see everyone is excited and has put a lot of hard work into it. Now we have to go testing and see where the car is. “I feel very prepared for the season, The car is ready.
We could go testing today if we wanted, which is a good step in preparation and now it is time to try and keep improving all the season.”
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