McLaren not concerned about their new car not being used at the first pre-season test session
It was recently revealed that most of the teams including Ferrari and Red Bull Racing Team will use their new cars at the first pre-season test session in Valencia. McLaren on the other hand, announced that they will release their new car later than the
rest of the teams, as always.
Since the team is expected to release its new car on the 4th February, that is after the Valencia test session, the MP4-26 will miss the session. Team McLaren recently stated that they are not concerned about this matter as it won’t affect the
performance or reliability of their 2011 car. McLaren’s engineering director Paddy Lowe is confident that McLaren has made the right decision.
“It's always been in our plan to launch it after the first test. One of the reasons was we wanted to make use of the first test to work with the old car, a stable and known platform, whilst we understand the new tyres and get to know those,” confirmed Lowe.
The team claims that they will launch their new car later than the rest of the teams mainly due to the fact that they have not installed either KERS (Kinetic Energy Recover System) or adjustable rear wings in their 2011 chassis.
“It's always a bit of a balancing act between how much mileage you're going to cover from the reliability point of view and from a set-up point of view working with the new car. Then you're trading against development time in the lab, the wind tunnel and
in the office,” Lowe said.
He believes that the new McLaren car is more reliable and the team had to reduce the mileage on the chassis, but that was never an issue for them. Lowe also feels confident about the anticipated performance of their 2011 car, as a lot of planning went into
it.
It is expected that the team will launch it's car in Berlin and according to Lowe, it is at the request of their main sponsor and partners Vodafone. It would be interesting to see the difference between the MP4-26 and the rest of the new cars after the respective
teams launch their 2011 cars before the 2011 Formula 1 season.
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