Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, Thursday, 29 January

Find out what happened on Day 2 of the pre-season Shakedown in Barcelona, and get the thoughts of McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 driver Oscar Piastri and Technical Director, Performance Mark Temple. 

The MCL40 returned to track for the second consecutive day of running with Oscar Piastri covering 223.536km while on driving duties as McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team continued their pre-season testing programme at Formula 1's Barcelona Shakedown.  

Having completed our run plan this morning, during the lunch break the team identified an issue on the fuel system that required extensive investigation. This ultimately meant we concluded our running for the day early, and the team are now hard at work ensuring the car is in the best possible condition for tomorrow’s session.  

The team’s opening two days of running have provided a good baseline understanding of the MCL40. Every time we run, we gain more knowledge of our package and the performance characteristics of this new era of regulations. From our first two days of running, it is also clear that there are development and performance opportunities to exploit. Additionally, from these very early hours of track time, it looks like some competitors have set a very high bar for performance. 

The team will conclude the Barcelona shakedown tomorrow, when Lando and Oscar will share driving duties and expand our knowledge, as we seek to maximise performance from the various new racing modes and our overall package in the MCL40. 

Oscar Piastri

Laps	48 (138.899 miles/223.536km)
Best lap time	1m18.419s (+1.974s), 4th

"It was nice to be back out today, especially in the new car. There’s a lot of challenges this year up and down the grid, so it was good to get stuck in. We had a fuel system issue, which cut our day short, but the team’s working hard to get that fixed and back out tomorrow. 

“These cars are completely different to what we’ve had the last few years. That’s part of what this test is about. We’ve already identified a few things that we can try to improve on the car to make it feel a bit nicer. We have one more day of running tomorrow. We’ll continue to get used to the car and get a good read on how different things feel. Then we’ll find a good direction to make the car quicker and feel nicer.” 

Mark Temple
Technical Director, Performance 

“Second day on track, with positives to take away. We’ve got a good understanding of where the car is from a baseline point of view. In this shakedown, the most important aspect for drivers is that they understand how the new car operates, how the power unit interacts, and the process of energy management. Oscar now has some good reference points for that, as well as a feel for how the chassis behaves. 

“Overall, we haven't encountered anything too unexpected. The behaviour and handling of the car is in line with what we thought, so nothing is catching the drivers out. It’s just about learning and getting to know it, and then as we get more time, we’ll look to try and tweak or tune the car. This is a shakedown and is meant to help us identify any issues so we can understand and solve them going into Bahrain, so that’s our big focus as we go into the final day tomorrow. 

“Of course, it’s a shame we could not run in the afternoon as every minute of track time is precious at such an early stage of the season. We discovered a fuel system problem, which meant we haven’t been able to do all the running we would like. The car is very complex, so we decided to bring the car back into the garage and strip it down to fully understand where the problem is coming from, ahead of tomorrow’s running.”