I will be honest, I did not have faith in McLaren. Objectively this is the best the team has looked in years. Let us not forget, however, that one lap pace and race pace are different beasts. Haas will tell you. Even Lando was P3 on the grid before these updates in Spain. While the race pace looked decent in practice we won’t know for sure until tomorrow afternoon how much the car has really improved. If both cars come home in the top 6 then maybe it’s time to crack open the champagne and celebrate a turnaround. Hopefully im not raining on the parade too hard; we’ve seen the team have good weekends before and fail to translate them into long-term success (how big was the turnaround that Spa, Monza, Sochi ‘21 provided? After that, Seidl, Key, and co. were lauded all over, including here), so we must wait and see what happens over the rest of the year.
As for these updates and whose credit they should go to, Key was officially let go (press release was issued) at the end of March. I hesitate to believe that they wholesale redesigned, tested, and produced “every part that touches the air” in three months. Already at the launch they mentioned that they were changing direction and were 2-3 months behind. To me it seems like fundamentally at least this package would have been in development while Key was at least still employed. For sure, the change of structure and personnel shifting will have an impact on decisions regarding certain aspects of this update and the general culture of the technical department. Conveniently we no longer hear about things like the wind tunnel or sim or whatever else being a bottleneck, which is nice even though nothings changed yet in that area (should be close, no?).
In short, there are less signs that this is a false dawn than in the past, and clearly the car is moving forward, which is good. Whoever gets credit is more of a semantic issue than a substantial one, and unless James Key, Pete Prod, and Neil Oatley are here (hello if you are!) we won’t know. Tomorrow will tell us more than today for sure.