McLaren racing director Eric Boullier will not set any targets before the start of the season for fear of ending up with “wrong expectations”.
Last season’s struggles have left McLaren looking to improve on ninth place in the constructors’ championship, with the team entering its second year with Honda as power unit supplier. Pre-season showed a step forward in reliability while McLaren was also keen to stress it will add more performance to its car by the Australian Grand Prix.
Despite being optimistic of a more competitive year, Boullier says setting precise targets would be foolish until McLaren knows how much progress it has made relative to the opposition.
“You ask me a date or you ask me a commitment on a date or something which we can’t say anything and we don’t want to say anything,” Boullier said.
“We know where we are, we have a comparison which is the lap time when we obviously will be competing in the same conditions and then from that point we will know where we are and what we want to achieve and we will see where we will go.
“But today we are still not in a position to give any accurate predictions, so we don’t want to have any wrong expectations.”
Asked what would be a good result for the team in Australia, Boullier joked he just wants to see an improvement on last year where Kevin Magnussen failed to make it to the grid.
“No numbers, no predictions because it is going to again have the wrong expectations, so I’m not going to say anything.
“Both cars starting the race would be a challenge and both cars finishing the race would be brilliant!”
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