07/01/2023
NEWS STORY
McLaren has become the fifth team to reveal the date on which it will unveil its 2023 contender.
The team, which has won 12 drivers' and 8 constructors' titles, the last of which was in 1998, revealed the launch date in a somewhat cryptic post (top) on social media.
The Woking outfit follows AlphaTauri (11 Feb) Aston Martin (13 Feb), Ferrari (14 Feb) and Alpine (16 Feb) as excitement over the new season slowly builds.
Interestingly, the Woking outfit will take the wraps off its new car on 16 February, the same day as Alpine reveals the 523, the French outfit having beaten McLaren to fourth in the 2022 standings.
It's a fairly new look for the Woking team this year with rookie Oscar Piastri partnering Lando Norris and Andrea Stella the team's new principal following the departure of Andreas Seidl.
The days when McLaren (and Williams) ruled the roost a distant memory, Zak Brown admits that the target for the coming season is to reclaim fourth spot from Alpine.
"We kind of have two data points that we pay most attention to," he told Speedcafe.com last month. "One is, how close are we to the team that's winning. If that team is not Mercedes, our other data point, given what a great team Mercedes is, and we share the same engine, is how close are we to Mercedes."
Other than Stella being able to fill the shoes of Seidl, who impressed from the outset, and Piastri living up to expectations, McLaren is placing a lot of emphasis for its revival on its new windtunnel which should be online later in the year.
"We'd like to get back up to at least fourth in the championship," said Brown. "But I think we're going to need a little bit more of our technology in place to really be able to break into the top three."
Having secured Piastri's services following a bitter, protracted struggle with Alpine which saw the matter eventually settled by the FIA's Contract Recognition Board, Brown has full faith in the Australian.
"He's a very focused, mature, fast individual from everything that we've seen so far," said the American. "His track record is much like Lando's in that he's kind of won everything in his first year along the way, which is pretty rare, and which means you have got to be pretty, pretty special.
"So we just need to integrate them into the team, like we did with Lando, and hope that he finds his feet. He will have plenty of support from us. We want to make sure there's not too much pressure on him coming into a big team against a very difficult, fast team-mate."