McLaren Racing’s CEO Zak Brown recently dropped a bombshell about his team’s ongoing concerns. The 51-year-old revealed that some of the concerns that his side is currently facing stem from last year when Daniel Ricciardo was a part of the team.
Brown revealed that since the Australian was underperforming, McLaren used him as a scapegoat and hid the team’s underlying concerns. Ricciardo, who joined Red Bull as a test driver at the beginning of this season, had a disastrous campaign with McLaren last year.
He finished eleventh in the championship and just scored 37 points. In stark contrast, his teammate Lando Norris finished seventh and scored 122 points, 85 more points than the 33-year-old.
Daniel Ricciardo’s struggles overshadowed McLaren’s underlying concerns
Zak Brown‘s recent revelations seem to suggest that Daniel Ricciardo‘s continuous underperformance last year overshadowed McLaren’s underlying concerns. In a conversation with racingnews365.com, the 51-year-old began by stating that his side began the 2022 season with some challenges in pre-season testing with the brake ducts.
However, Brown believes that this issue never really caught the attention of anybody. He in fact believes that it was the driver-related issue of Ricciardo underperforming that grabbed everyone’s attention and became ‘the headline’.
View this post on Instagram
When speaking of the underlying concerns that the team was facing last season that went unnoticed, Brown added, “Underneath the surface, I wasn’t happy with the pace of the development of the racing car. That was the second half of last year”.
McLaren‘s struggles last season were evident considering how much better they performed in 2021. After finishing an outstanding fourth in the championship in 2021 with 275 points, they finished fifth in the championship in 2022 with just 159 points.
McLaren continues to struggle significantly in 2023
Even though McLaren has brought in 22-year-old Oscar Piastri to replace the underperforming Daniel Ricciardo, their results have not improved at all. In fact, they have significantly worsened.
McLaren has just scored 12 points so far and that too because of immense fortune going their way. With only 12 drivers managing to cross the finish line in Australia, McLaren made the most of their opportunity by registering a double points finish.
Lando Norris scored eight points for the team by finishing in sixth, while Oscar Piastri scored four by finishing in eighth. Besides their strong performance in Australia, McLaren underperformed massively in both Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.
Norris finished 17th in both Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, while Piastri had a DNF in Bahrain and finished 15th in Saudi Arabia. These results clearly seem to suggest that Ricciardo was not the primary cause of McLaren’s struggles last year.
