McLaren F1 boss reveals 'very clear mission' after reliability woes

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has said McLaren "only want to think about performance" while urging Mercedes to keep on top of the reliability issues that have plagued its power unit this season.

McLaren, and particularly Lando Norris, have suffered numerous problems with the Mercedes power unit this term. While this has rarely occurred on a race day, Norris has been forced to sit out significant portions of practice sessions, or even miss the running entirely, while repairs have been made to his car.

In Spain, the team enjoyed trouble-free running for the entire weekend, with Stella quizzed on finally being able to complete an event to the scheduled plan. 

“Finally, a relatively calm and clean weekend from a reliability point of view," he told media, including Crash.net. 

"Of course, we don't have to forget that in some of the previous weekends we didn't only have problems on Sunday but we also had problems affecting practice. So there's been improvement from this point of view.

“Reliability, you know, I don't want to judge it in a single race. I would like to judge it in a season and say we had a couple of exceptions. But we have to rebuild from where we were, so we take one race at a time, one event at a time. Good that we haven't had any issues here in Spain. We have definitely raised the bar, the level of attention, used the situations we had in the previous races to reset and increase the standards in the way we do things."

With the season being contested to all new power unit and chassis regulations, the campaign has become a development war, with Ferrari the latest to make a stride forward with a significant package in Barcelona, which aided Lewis Hamilton to take his first win in red. 

Given the emphasis on adding performance, Stella was clear on the need to maintain better reliability standards, to allow the focus to remain where it needs to be. 

He added: “This is McLaren and this is also McLaren, our suppliers and our collaboration with HPP. We need to retain the standards. The mission is very clear. We only want to think about performance, an area of performance in which we also have quite a lot to improve.”