McLaren is taking measures to ensure a less troublesome pre-season following problems in recent years.
Mechanical issues have meant the British team has gone into a new season much less prepared than their rivals due to a lack of running in testing.
While Honda was mostly to blame during their three-year partnership, the same was true in 2018 with Renault, as McLaren completed fewer laps in eight days as Sebastian Vettel did by himself.
“I don’t want to share in detail some of the things we’re doing differently this off-season than we did last season,” CEO Zak Brown commented to RACER.
“[But] we are doing things differently to be more prepared, not just with the performance but we had a lot of reliability issues going into Barcelona testing last year. So we have taken some measures to get ahead of that.”
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Last year’s problems also led to a halt in development which impacted McLaren for much of the season, but Brown is confident of a more normal program in 2019.
“We will continue to develop, as all F1 teams do, on a weekly basis and we’ll bring to Australia our most developed package that we have since we started developing the car and having reliability programs to make sure [it is better].
“One of the reasons why we were slower to bring performance (in 2018) is because we had reliability issues.
“You roll off the truck in Barcelona, instead of being able to get straight down to performance, you’re having issues — wheel nut issues, heating issues — you then stop focusing on performance and you start focusing on reliability.
“The team did a good job to give us reliability coming out of Spain testing, to have cars both finish in the points in Australia.”
The McLaren boss concluded with a final evaluation heading into this year.
“We’re in a better place performance wise and reliability coming into winter testing,” Brown believes.