McLaren has outlined the "noticeable" gain that should come from their car upgrades in the next few races. The team will bring the first raft of updates to the Red Bull Ring, with the rest being split between the next events at Silverstone and the Hungaroring. It follows the troubled start to the season for McLaren in which they failed to meet their pre-season targets, leading to Technical Director James Key being replaced by Peter Prodromou and Neil Houldey alongside former Ferrari head of vehicle concept David Sanchez. Team Principal Andrea Stella said the team is "banking" on the updates to work at the upcoming races and revealed their expectations of what they should bring to the table. "I'm banking on this package, but across pretty much three races in which we will introduce it, these should be a few tenths of a second - it should be noticeable from a lap time point of view," Stella told media, including RacingNews365.com .
McLaren expect updates to turn around fortunes
The team expects the race in Austria to provide a good baseline for where they stand in terms of performance with the updates. Stella added: "Austria is a track in which we have done well at in the past. I think there is six or seven corners where four of them are high speed which we should be competitive on. "Our first step of bringing upgrades and I think these can be more important in seeing how suitable the track is to our car." Stella hopes the updates will enable McLaren to turn around their fortunes this season, as they look to finish more regularly in the midfield battle for points and be in contention for podiums. "Ultimately this is a milestone in terms of possibly turning around the season. Not only thanks to what we are bringing to Austria, but also thanks to what will follow in the next phase," he said. "So even if we have only one session, hopefully we'd be able to validate the new package, [then] from there move on to a more competitive situation."
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