McLaren team principal Andreas Seidl says it’s too soon to be sure they have the fourth-fastest car despite their strong run of recent results.

The team has scored points with both cars in the last two rounds, has become a regular fixture in Q3 and are holding fourth place in the championship. However Seidl remains cautious about the extent of the recovery from their unsuccessful 2018 campaign.

“I think it’s still too early to say really if that’s a consistent trend, that we are somehow P4, P5 in terms of performance,” he said.

“[It’s] interesting to see that when you look at the other teams they have a bit more of an up-and-down, track-by-track [performance] at the moment or at least it seems like. We can consistently fight at the front of these midfield teams which is encouraging and hopefully we can keep that up for the other races that are coming up.”

However Seidl added McLaren must keep up their development rate to remain as competitive as they have been recently.

“Overall we just need to have more downforce,” he said. “If you ask me what I want for Christmas, it’s efficient downforce.”

“As always this is where the gap is coming from that we are having to the top teams,” he added. “And that is something we are continuously working on and we still try to bring more updates during the course of this season to the car.”

McLaren’s technical team has been overhauled in the last 12 months. The development of the 2019 car was led by Pat Fry ahead of the arrival of new technical director James Key, who is in charge of next year’s MCL35. Seidl said the team will have to think carefully about when to prioritise the work on its 2020 machine.

“We have already started with the development of next year’s car,” he said. “We simply need to figure out when do we actually stop developing this year’s car in order to make sure we make the next step with next year’s car.”

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2019 F1 season