The CEO of McLaren, Zak Brown, recently revealed that Daniel Ricciardo, who was underperforming last year, was used as a scapegoat by the team amidst technical problems with the car. The Aussie driver was able to secure only 37 points in the last F1 season while his teammate Lando Norris got 85 points more than him, finishing up with 122 points in 2022. With such a disastrous F1 season, McLaren decided to leave Daniel Ricciardo out of the team.
In a chat with the website RacingNews365.com, Zak Brown talked about the challenges McLaren had with their car and how it got overshadowed by Daniel Ricciardo’s performances as a driver in 2022. He said, “We started with some challenges in testing with the brake ducts. The car was okay. Then we had the driver-related issues that we were working through which took the attention, the headline.”
McLaren's CEO discussed the development side of things of the 2022 car and how displeased he was with the efforts behind the scenes. “Meanwhile, underneath the surface, I wasn’t happy with the pace of the development of the racing car. That was the second half of last year if you look at the pace of development with some of the other teams where they started and where they ended, versus where we started and where we ended.”
In the last two F1 campaigns, the quality of performance and the number of points have both gone down significantly for McLaren. After scoring 259 points in the 2021 season, the British constructors only got 159 points at the end of the 2022 season.
Furthermore, the 2023 F1 campaign for McLaren has started on a very poor note as the newest team driver Oscar Piastri and his experienced teammate Lando Norris have been able to collect only 12 points in 3 races so far. Their only points finish this season came in the Australian Grand Prix where Norris finished in sixth place and Piastri finished in eighth place after 8 DNFs occurred in the race.
