The comeback of McLaren

In 2018 McLaren, a team who have been a pillar of motorsport, were sat in 6^th when they should have clearly been 4^th in the best of the rest position in terms of the team’s history and drivers. A change was needed, and it came for the 2019 season as they would bring in Spaniard Carlos Sainz Jr and youngster Lando Norris as drivers.

Firstly, they brought in veteran in Carlos Sainz Jr, but one that has been racing in F1 for four years before moving to McLaren. He had proved that he can get a great performance out of cars that weren’t practically the best when in his final year at Renault he had impressive 6^th and 5^th place finishes .

The Spaniard would bring experience for the McLaren team to rebuild their car and extend his knowledge of an F1 car to the team.

Their second driver would be rookie Lando Norris who after an impressive F2 season was part of a new batch drivers entering F1 and technically speaking he got the best seat landing himself in the orange team’s car. Lando would bring that excitement to the team as this was his first season, he will have wanted to prove why he should have been chosen with aggressiveness and passion to do well.

The changes would not show at first with Carlos not getting a points finish and only Lando getting one points but one thing that would come clear between this driver line-up is driver consistency. In the previous year Fernando Alonso ended the season with nine points finishes and Stoffel Vandoorne with a mere four.

In 2019 though we can clearly see that these drivers drastically improved on this when Carlos ended on 12 points finishes and Lando on 11.

How did this happen? Well for one it comes across that these two have a better relationship than the previous team. From multiple videos on the McLaren YouTube page where you can clearly see them two getting along well and Carlos hopping into Lando’s twitch streams to play FIFA. This was incredible smart by McLaren in terms of getting a young driver line-up because they will theoretically have more in common than Fernando (Age 37) and Stoffel (Age 26).

How has this helped the team?

If you look at the standing in 2018 Fernando had 50 points placing him 11^th and Stoffel had 12 points sitting down in 16^th but in 2019 Carlos finished on an impressive 96 points only being beaten by the top 3 teams and finishing in 6th and Lando didn’t have bad season at all nearly quadrupling Stoffel’s points , finishing on 49 points and in 11^th . This is also boosted by aggressiveness of having young and hungry drivers not a 37-year-old who is ready to try something new.

If you compare Brazil’s races in 2018 it was a 17^th and 15^th whereas in 2019 its 3^rd and 8^th. Just look at the overall improvement that has occurred from doing one of the simplest things in motorsport no not rebuilding a car from scratch its having drivers who are young and ready.