McLaren forced to put new wind tunnel on hold

Mark Scott
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FIA bring in former McLaren technical chief Tim Goss.

McLaren are looking to recommence work on major projects, such as their new wind tunnel, after recently securing additional funds.

The Woking team has received a £150million loan from the Royal Bank of Bahrain after months of exploring different options which did include the potential to sell a minority stake in the McLaren Group company.

But McLaren’s financial struggles have now been ‘solved’ with this new cash boost and one of Seidl’s main focuses is to get the team back to being fully operational in all areas again.

“At the beginning of this crisis we simply had to put on hold all the infrastructure projects we were working on,” Seidl told the official Formula 1 website, amongst others, in a video call.

“Even now, not knowing exactly how the income will look like during this year, we are still cautious there, and simply have to wait until we have the green light there again.

“As you can imagine I’m pushing hard to get these different infrastructure measures in place again as quickly as possible.

“We all know this will be key in our journey back to the front in Formula 1 as we have a deficit there compared to the top teams. I’m quite optimistic once we are through this crisis we get back on track with our infrastructure as well.”

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Seidl also said that, despite a turbulent start to the year, McLaren’s plans for the 2020 and 2021 campaigns have been largely unaffected as they look to build on their P4 finish in the 2019 Constructors’ Championship.

He added: “The financial challenges we were in, and also with the measures we took in place quite early on with the pay cuts and the furlough, which was in parallel with the shutdown, to be honest didn’t really affect our output for this year or for next year.

“We are on course with the plan we set out over the winter.

“We are planning to bring updates regularly from Austria onwards on the car, and at the same time we are flat out in getting next year’s car ready with the biggest topic being the integration of the Mercedes power unit.”

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