• Spanish Grand Prix

'10 or 12 upgrades' for McLaren

Tim Goss says the most obvious updates will be to the rear of the car © Sutton Images

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• Spanish Grand Prix

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• McLaren

McLaren will be running "10 or 12 upgrades" at the Spanish Grand Prix this weekend according to chief engineer Tim Goss.

Having planned to have a number of upgrades at the Turkish Grand Prix, a manufacturing issue meant that the parts were not 100% reliable and so were not added to the car. The result was a less competitive weekend as Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button finished fourth and sixth respectively. Goss, however, says that all of those upgrades plus a few more will be trialled in Barcelona on Friday.

"As usual the relentless pace of upgrades continues," Goss said. "We have a package of upgrades that we're taking to Spain - we take upgrades to every race - but in total we will have about 10 or 12 upgrades, some of which will be noticeable from the outside and some of them are not noticeable.

"Our objective obviously is to win races and ultimately win championships and to do that we've got to close the gap on Red Bull and we just keep chipping away at the problems. We had a package for the Turkish Grand Prix that we took there. As ever we're always trying to accelerate getting upgrades to the circuit as quickly as possible and just prior to the Turkish Grand Prix we had a relatively minor issue which meant that I wasn't confident that the upgrades would be durable for a race distance so we pulled out of that at the last minute. We'll re-evaluate all of our upgrades on Friday in Spain and those that look good we'll take forwards."

Goss also said that the most noticeable updates will be to the rear of the car, which has undergone major changes from its original planned design.

"As you know we introduced a change of concept to the rear end of our car just before the start of the season. We've been living with some sub-optimal packaging in that region for several races now and I think what you'll see is some bodywork and floor changes that aim to tidy up that area of the installation."

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