Eric Boullier says the car the McLaren F1 Team will bring to the Spanish Grand Prix next month should have been the one they brought to the season-opening Australian Grand Prix, and he hopes the updates can solve the issues the Woking-based team has suffered in Qualifying so far in 2018.
Neither Fernando Alonso nor Stoffel Vandoorne have made it into the top ten shootout in any of the opening three races, although their race pace has been much better, with five top ten finishes between them and twenty-eight points scored in that time.
Now Boullier hopes both drivers will benefit with an updated MCL33 to ensure they start higher up the grid and score even better results on Sundays.
“The 2018 car is coming to Barcelona, and obviously we hope that’s the car we expect it to be,” said Boullier to Motorsport.com. “The car we have now, is as per plan, it’s not that we missed the [performance] targets with it.
“But we missed the schedule targets with it, which means the car we’ll have in Barcelona should have been in Australia. So we are running actually with an evolution of last year, and not the new car. And this car hopefully will be the one that we expect.”
Boullier admitted there has been a lot of frustration in the opening races of the season knowing they have not given either Alonso or Vandoorne the car to fight where he feels they should be, but both have made the best of the opportunities presented to them.
“This is what it is. We knew this, and we just have to take the best we can,” said Boullier. “So far we have been opportunistic, and we took the opportunities we’ve had with both drivers to take as many points as we could.
“It’s just frustrating to see that we have such performance or pace in the race, and we are unable to unlock yet that performance in qualifying.”
