McLaren found weakness ‘cure’ in Hungary

McLaren principal Andreas Seidl is delighted with the upgrades which look to have cured their weakness in slow-speed corners.

The team have regularly sighted their performance in slow-speed sections as a weakness of the MCL34, so expectations were low heading into the tight and technical Hungarian Grand Prix.

However, Carlos Sainz secured P5 in the race, while team-mate Lando Norris would have finished higher than P9 if it hadn’t have been for issues at his pit stop.

This is a good sign for McLaren as they have proved they can be competitive at different track types, and for Seidl it shows the upgrades are working.

“On a track with a lot of low-speed corners, where we had definitely a weakness on the car, to see that we could now cure some of the issues with the updates we are bringing, and understanding the car better, and better, and how to use it, it is obviously great to have clearly been the fourth-quickest car.” he told Autosport.

“It is now a big boost for us going into the break, and also for the second half of the season because we have some tracks coming up with low-speed sections and so on.

“That is very, very encouraging.”

Sadly Sainz, who heads into the summer break with back-to-back P5 finishes, wasn’t as optimistic as his team principal.

“Maybe the Hungaroring has become a medium speed track with Formula 1 cars because it feels fast out there and that suits us a bit better than what we anticipated,” he said.

“And this kind of black Tarmac, as we saw in Austria and Paul Ricard, new surfaces help our performance.

“This weekend we were decently surprised, but still we were lapped so that’s another thing that we need to add to that, so we still have a lot of work to do.”

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