De Ferran: Little changes making huge difference for McLaren

Gil de Ferran says that the changes that McLaren has made to its senior staff is making a major difference for the Woking squad so far in 2019.

McLaren has enjoyed a positive start to the season, despite Carlos Sainz retiring from the opening two races. 

His teammate Lando Norris secured a sixth-place finish at Bahrain last time out, and missed out on points in Australia after getting stuck behind Antonio Giovinazzi, which hampered his strategy.

McLaren has made a number of changes over the last 12 months, with Eric Boullier, Tim Goss and Matt Morris all leaving the team. Bahrain marked James Key's first race working as McLaren's chief technical officer, while Andreas Seidl is set to start work next month as the team boss.

“I guess if you recall even last year I always said we had great people at McLaren,” said de Ferran. “And I think with little changes in the organisation that we made, and the way we are dealing with each other, that talent is shining through.

“This is a team effort, and as a team working together really is something that makes a huge difference. There was a lot of effort into exactly that subject: how do we work better together?

"How do we collaborate better together? And, largely, with the same personnel we have improved a lot. And hopefully we’ll continue to do that; it was James’ first weekend so he’s a new talent that comes into the team.

“Andreas will come later on in the year but I think as long as we keep improving on how we collaborate and work together we’ll continue to get better. Often not enough credit is given to that account.”

McLaren endured tough 2018 season, partly due to the team switching focus onto the MCL34 midway through the year.

“I think one of the good things going on is the car is behaving as we expect basically,” he said.

“Our engineers understand the weaknesses of this year’s car and little by little we’re trying to address that and improve the car. Hopefully we’ll continue to see incremental steps as fast as we can.”