Will off-season change help or hinder McLaren’s push for F1 momentum?

The change in naming pattern is a nice touch from a team that has always been very engaged with its history. While recent years haven’t offered anything like the kind of heyday that has left the corridor next to the MTC’s canteen filled with trophies – designed on purpose for the employees to walk past every day – the team has been firmly on the path to recovery.

Or so it seemed. McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown admitted back in 2021 that the team’s trajectory from ninth to sixth to fourth to third in the constructors’ championship didn’t meant the team would then go second-first. Instead, it slipped to fourth in 2021 – perhaps to be expected given Ferrari’s recovery to establish the ‘big three’ – and then to fifth last year, losing its ‘best of the rest’ crown to Alpine. 

There were definite high points for McLaren to take from 2022. It was the only team to score a podium outside of the big three, courtesy of Lando Norris at Imola. Norris once again starred throughout the season despite admitting that the MCL36 car was “very unsuited” to his driving style. The team also managed to bounce back well from the points where it struggled – notably the season opener in Bahrain that left a fairly bleak outlook for the season – even if it wasn’t enough to keep up with Alpine’s ‘little but often’ approach to updates in the fight for P4.

Norris’s displays only further justified the long-term deal McLaren moved to lock him into ahead of the 2022 season, ensuring he was in place until the end of 2025. “It is obvious that he has everything he needs in order to become an absolute top guy in this paddock,” then-McLaren team principal Andreas Seidl told Motorsport.com in Abu Dhabi. “But of course, in order to prove that and show that, he obviously also needs the team and the car, which is our task to give him in the future.”

While Norris could adjust to the quirks of the MCL36, the same could not be said of his team-mate. The struggles faced by Daniel Ricciardo that ultimately paved the way for his exit from the team, a year before his contract was due to expire, were the overriding story of the season. An eight-time grand prix winner and the man responsible for McLaren’s only race win in the past decade could not make it work with the MCL36. It was a sorry story for all involved.

Axing Ricciardo may have been costly,…