McLaren admits it’s lost two weeks of development for 2018

McLaren racing director Eric Boullier has revealed the team will be working non-stop between now and the start of the 2018 season in order to recover two weeks of development time it lost during contract negotiations as it prepares to switch to Renault engines.

After it was confirmed McLaren would split from Honda after a disastrous three seasons and change to Renault power from 2018, Boullier says the deal was only sorted in the past few days having missed a deadline at the Italian Grand Prix.

With two weeks of potential development plans for next year lost to negotiations, Boullier admits McLaren has a challenge ahead to recover the time but is confident the Woking-based team has the capabilities to regain the lost time by purely increasing its workload.

“Now we have to work 24/7 to try to recover a couple of weeks where an ideal decision could’ve been taken but two weeks is recoverable,” Boullier said. “It won’t be any compromise next year. Of course, we don’t have the same experience as some of the costumers, so we have to discover the package.

“We can trust our engineers to do a very good job and two weeks are recoverable, this is going to be a huge load of work but I’m glad to see there’s a lot of energy going inside McLaren to try and recover as fast as possible.”

Boullier says final developments for the 2017 McLaren-Honda car will also continue alongside preparations for next season in order to maintain its charge for a strong finish to the season.

“We are increasing the workload to make sure we can recover, and once we recover we will go back to the standard way to work,” he said. “We have a different process today about work, because next year’s car despite the change of power unit, is an evolution not a revolution.”