McLaren has ruled out changing its F1 development plans despite the threat posed by Max Verstappen in this year’s title race.
Verstappen took his third win in four races at the American Grand Prix on Sunday.
With five races and two sprints remaining, Verstappen is 40 points clear of Oscar Piastri in the title race.
Lando Norris’ second place finish at the Circuit of the Americas cut his lead over Piastri to 14 points, leaving Verstappen 26 points behind Norris to lead Mexico this weekend.
McLaren boss Andrea Stella confirmed there will be no new upgrades or parts introduced during the remaining five races.
“In terms of new upgrades and new parts, I don’t think that will happen for the rest of the season,” Stella said.
McLaren had the pace to challenge Verstappen
It was a sub-optimal weekend for McLaren.
Both cars crashed and went off the track in Saturday’s sprint race, putting them at a disadvantage in terms of machine setup.
Piastri had a tough weekend in Austin.
Sky Sports’ Ted Kravitz suggested that McLaren had been “conservative” in its choice of ride height due to a lack of data from the sprint.
Stella also hinted that in hindsight McLaren had better car performance.
“As far as new upgrades and new parts, that’s not going to happen for the rest of the season,” Stella told reporters in Austin.
“First of all, trend-wise, I think it’s a relatively safe race today, because even without fighting Charles, which in itself was certainly an interesting battle, I think Lando had the pace to win today’s race,” Stella explained.
“Obviously he needed to gain positions on the track, which was never easy for Max and if we had adopted a one-stop strategy we wouldn’t necessarily have had many chances from a strategic point of view, but in terms of performance I think we were reassured that the pace was good enough to fight for the win.”
“As I explained to some of your colleagues, I think not having a sprint race put us at a bit of a disadvantage from a set-up standpoint.
“And with hindsight, we can already see that we could have squeezed even more performance out of this car.”