Credits: IMAGO / Michael Potts

McLaren CEO, Zak Brown had claimed back in 2022 that his team would be ready to fight Red Bull from the 2025 season onwards. However, only two years after his statement, the Woking-based team have emerged as the closest championship rival to the Bulls — with it looking ever so likely that McLaren will beat the Milton Keynes-based team this year.

On ESPN’s Unlapped Podcast, Nate Saunders reflected on Brown’s claims. At the time, given Red Bull’s advantage and McLaren’s midfield struggles, Saunders did not believe that it was possible. “Even back then I was like, ‘Well, its a tall order’”, he admitted.

Still, the 2024 season has seen Brown‘s premonition come true even before his deadline. Saunders attributes this to the positive effect the cost cap and the aerodynamic testing regulations have brought to the latest generation of F1 racing.

He explained, “Our belief, and it has been shaken a lot this year, [was] that these [performance] advantages were very difficult to break. That, that was locked in for a long, long time. That was true for years.”

“I think we’re seeing the teams being restricted in a good way by the cost-cap. We’ve got teams that have different time in the wind tunnel based on that sliding scale of development.”, the ESPN journalist added.

Saunders also commended McLaren for the route they took with the development of the MCL38. The team won their first Grand Prix of the year in Miami and have won two more races in Budapest and Zandvoort since.

McLaren’s 2023 sacrifices have come good this season

The Woking team started the 2023 season as arguably the slowest car at the season-opening Bahrain GP. However, rapid development made them serious podium contenders from the Austrian GP onwards.

Saunders explained that McLaren then identified certain strong aspects of their design concept. But they sacrificed it to build a more complete car — and it has done them wonders in 2024.

That being said, according to the hosts of the show, the team still does have its fair share of weaknesses. One such aspect is how the engineers communicate with the drivers — showing a lack of faith in their own prospects.

“There still seems to be a very strange dynamic when they’re talking to their drivers on the pit wall. Still an air of uncertainty. An air of indecisiveness”, concluded Saunders. Many experts highlighted that this uncertainty could be due to McLaren’s lack of experience in being a frontrunner for over a decade.