McLaren announced the timing for the release of major new products

After two races of the season, McLaren is third in the constructors’ championship. Team boss Andrea Stella said engineers are already preparing a major technical update for the MCL38, which will appear on the car at the Imola or Monaco stage at the end of the first third of the season.

Andrea Stella: “The Jeddah track demonstrated very well the strengths and weaknesses of our car. Let’s start with the strongest: in the first sector all teams lost time compared to us. The first sector consists of fast turns, where it is enough to turn the steering wheel once – our car responds very well to this action.

However, in corners where you have to work a lot with the steering wheel, we are not yet as competitive as we would like. The Ferrari is very fast in these corners. It is no coincidence that Charles Leclerc was competitive in the latter sector.

We understand the car better and better, and we have some reserve of speed that we can regain. But I think it’s no more than a tenth at best.

We’ll have some new stuff in Australia and hopefully Japan. This will only let you play for a few milliseconds. However, Suzuki’s first sector is similar to Jeddah’s first sector, so we expect it to do well in Japan.

Then we will make a major update to the car at the end of the first third of the season. The debut of new products has nothing to do with logistics. It rather depends on whether we want to make a major upgrade to the car during the sprint stages.

But first, new items must be manufactured. We’ll send them to production as soon as we’re sure this is a really good update.”