McLaren has changed its approach to the off-season to reduce the reliability problems it experienced at the start of last year.

Zak Brown, CEO of McLaren Racing, said the teams are “doing things differently to be more prepared” than they were 12 months ago, “not just with performance but we had a lot of reliability issues going into Barcelona testing last year.”

McLaren covered the lowest pre-season testing mileage of any team last year. They logged 2,127 kilometres with the MCL33, less than half of that managed by Ferrari or Mercedes.

“We have taken some measures to get ahead of that,” said Brown. “We will continue to develop, as all Formula 1 teams do, on a weekly basis.”

Last year’s reliability problems slowed the development of the MCL33, Brown admitted.

“One of the reasons – not the only reason, but one of the reasons – why we were slower to bring performance is we had reliability issues. So you roll off the truck in Barcelona and instead of being able to get straight down to performance you’re immediately tackling wheel nut issues, heating issues and you then stop focussing on performance, start focusing on reliability.

“I think the team did a good job to give us reliability coming out of Spain testing to have both cars finish in the points in Australia. It isn’t what it looked like [being] in Spain. So I think we’re in a better place performance-wise and reliability coming into winter testing.”

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2019 F1 season