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Whether it is through quotes on the wall or an ethos we instinctively follow, our founder Bruce McLaren’s influence lives on throughout the team, but there’s one quote of his that feels particularly poignant at this time of year.

“One of my first lessons was to tackle one job at a time, do it thoroughly and be satisfied with the result before passing on to the next.”

Bruce was recalling his childhood when he and his father restored an old Austin Ulster 7, which he went on to drive to his first race win at only 15, but it’s an ethos that remained with him when he started his eponymous team a decade later, and one that could easily apply to modern-day car build and the work we’ve undertaken since switching the concept of our car design in 2022.

Within the same quote, Bruce adds: “I was learning by my mistakes and soon I felt I had the measure of the car’s shortcomings, and could do something about them.”

Car build is overseen by Team Principal Andrea Stella and his Technical, Planning, and Operational Teams, and stretches multiple departments and many, many people - specialists in their area who work on a particular section of the car. The vision is that each department has the same mentality as Bruce did.

That’s why, when we ask Andrea where he feels the car will have improved when it finally hits the track in Bahrain for Round 1 of the season, his response is: “I'm trying to think what area of the car we have not worked on to try and improve it.”

The answer is pretty much nowhere.

“The reality is that you try and improve in every single area of the car, and it would be a much bigger call to say that we don’t improve one area, rather than allowing the natural flow of development,” Andrea says. “This leads to the improvement of mechanical packaging, and the overall architecture of the car from a layout point of view. We have looked to try and improve car balance and interaction with the tyres.

“We are looking to try and save weight, which pretty much affects all parts of the car. We know there will be some marginal improvements on the power unit as well – we say marginal because power units are fundamentally frozen, but there's some performance that HPP will be able to bring, squeezing out what they can within the limitations on development set by the regulations. Improvements should come from all areas of the car.”

Our team have worked tirelessly to catch up to our competitors. At times, we had to set some clear priorities, however, at this stage of the journey, if we now decided to focus on just one single area or a select few only, then we’d likely fall behind the pack in other areas, and that would leave us chasing again.

This is not to say the team would ever spread their focus too broadly or overstretch themselves – the areas for improvement and the amount of time spent on each one is carefully curated by our Technical Leadership Team.

In Formula 1, the gaps that make the difference are small. There are gains to be made in every area of car build and the aim is to exploit all of them to create a better all-round car. That applies not just to the performance of the car, but also to its reliability and operational aspects. Around the factory, Andrea and the team have repeatedly stressed that a McLaren should never stop on track for reasons that could have anticipated and could have been under our control.

“I'm certainly pleased that we've been able to make significant steps forward after a difficult start to 2023 from a reliability point of view,” Andrea says, referring to the reliability issues that hampered the team in the opening round of last season. “I'm pleased, not because I look at the results, but because I look at the work that we have put into the technical reliability, in particular. In terms of looking at the organisation and the operating model of how we deal with reliability, we have deployed more forces and structure on reliability.

“From an attritional point of view, we have worked to try and be as forward-thinking as possible. Recently, some reliability problems have come from what was apparently a blind spot. In order to anticipate a problem coming from a blind spot, you have to think and search proactively. You can’t simply be passive and wait for the episode to happen and then react afterwards, because then you will always be on the back foot. That is the ethos we’ve tried to establish.

“We are working on further evolutions in terms of the way we look at reliability, which we will carry into the future. And, we have also added some more people to work on reliability.”

If this generation of Formula 1 car does have a metaphorical ceiling, then our team has yet to come up against it – Andrea says they can still see the margin for improvement. From a car and a team point of view, Andrea and his Technical Team would like to think that this is proof of the potential of our chosen concept. We still have a lot of work that needs to be done if we are to reach our targets, but they see the potential and it’s now down to us to transform this into realised performance.

You’re only as good as your last race, so says the classic sporting mantra, and that’s the overriding belief around the factory. We need to ensure we’re doing all we can to sustainably fight at the front of the pack, and this requires development to be as fast as it is thorough.

After installing a couple of major upgrades at last year’s Austrian Grand Prix, we enjoyed a decent step forward in our performances and Andrea says the team are targeting “this same gradient of development over time.”

From Andrea and CEO Zak Brown’s point of view, the team now have everything they could possibly need to achieve this objective, having consolidated the talent that was already present at McLaren, revamped the Technical Team, upgraded our facilities and infrastructure, and locked down our young driver pairing. It’s now up to them to find the right solutions to unlock even more performance, cognisant that we are all on a journey of continuous improvement.

“The development seems to be going on a similar trajectory to what we had for the Austria and Singapore upgrades,” he says. “But obviously, when you work on development for a new car, you spend many months without being able to see the behaviour of the car on track.

“You do all the due diligence so that when the car actually hits the ground it will correlate to your development tools as well as possible. So far, the indications are encouraging, but the answers will come once we have the car on the ground in pre-season testing."

The team have been working on the MCL38 since the conclusion of last season’s final upgrade, which was installed ahead of the Singapore Grand Prix in October, and the feedback has, so far, been promising. However, it is the ways of working that Andrea has been particularly pleased with.

“We're not just focused on results, but we are more focused on what leads to results and the things that are in our control,” Andrea explains. “What is in our control is that we keep doing the best possible work to deliver according to the talent that is present in the team, which is huge and increasing in every area. 

"The standards we set and the way in which we operate to produce the car needs to be the highest possible, all based on the aspect we care the most: collaboration and teamwork. If you do not have a strong collaborative attitude, then McLaren is not the place for you.

“We focus on doing the best we can, working collaboratively as a team. From this point onwards, the results take care of themselves”, Andrea adds. “We will use the results to check more accurately where we need to keep improving and where we need to accelerate the development of the team – that is our ethos.”

With car build complete and pre-season testing on the horizon, the next step is to race the MCL38, while the team back at the factory gets to work on the first set of in-season upgrades.