If you consider the constructors’ championship, 2018 was progress for McLaren. But on track, a car that looked handy to start with tailed off dramatically as the season went on. In the fifth of 10 individual team previews, we map out the best and worst case scenarios for the boys and girls in orange….

Last year’s ranking: 6th (62pts)

Driver line-up (2018 ranking): Carlos Sainz (10th), Lando Norris (n/a)

2019 F1 Car: MCL34

Best Case Scenario

McLaren are considered to have had a pretty poor season in 2018. Reliability issues plagued both their testing programme and the racing season, and the car was downright grumpy when it was running. And yet, on the raw statistics, McLaren were also F1’s best team last year. They jumped from ninth in the 2017 Constructor’s Championship to sixth. For any other team that would be cause for celebration. It isn’t – because despite being winless for six seasons, fans still expect more from Woking’s finest.

Last year the root cause of McLaren’s woes seemed to be a loss of correlation between wind tunnel and track. If nothing else, this year’s winter testing programme will have helped their engineers unclench a little, as the MCL34 seemed both well-balanced and reasonably rapid. They’re bang in the middle of the pack, fifth quickest (but less than a tenth off third quickest) and sixth on the mileage chart. While the numbers don’t really matter when the car runs well, McLaren’s 873 laps is over 250 more than they managed at the same time last year.

With the team occasionally running at the top of the timesheets, McLaren had the rare complication of having to downplay expectations. It’s not the worst problem to have, and McLaren were very open about running low fuel. Given last year’s qualifying woes, this seems more like a confidence building exercise than sponsor-friendly glory runs.

On the subject of expectation management, the actual management have suggested 2019 is likely to be an interim season, taking what they learned from the first year with Renault power, and building a better car around it. What they’ve built certainly looks better: it’s a good bet to at least hold sixth position, and may be capable of challenging to be top of the midfield.