Zak Brown says “it’s going to be tough” for McLaren to hold onto fourth

McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown believes “it’s going to be tough” for the team to hold onto fourth position in the constructor’s championship for the rest of the season with the competition from Renault and Toro Rosso increasing.

Going into the summer break the Woking based team had cemented themselves as the best of the rest behind Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull in fourth courtesy of top six finishes from Carlos Sainz and Lando Norris.
 
But one point from the races in Spa and Monza has seen Renault catch up to sit only 18 points behind thanks to a P4 and P5 finish in Italy for Daniel Ricciardo and Nico Hulkenberg, with Toro Rosso not too far behind.
 
Last year McLaren ended up sixth in the constructors but Brown hopes to finish a ‘realistic’ fourth place this time around.
 
“Well, we want to improve on last year. In reality, we were seventh, because of the points situation with Force India,” Brown said.
 
“So, on our road to recovery, we just want to improve incrementally, so fourth would be great but I think that’s about as much as we could realistically achieve.
 
“It’s going to be tough holding on to it but we’re up for it and we’ve got some very good competition from Renault and Toro Rosso’s not far behind.”
 
Renault team principal Cyril Abiteboul also stated the importance for the French team to catch McLaren for fourth place as they finished there last year with the expectation of doing it again.
 
“It’s relatively important,” said Abiteboul.
 
“It’s important in the sense that we were P4 last year and everyone is expecting, and everyone around us, including ourselves were expecting to be able to equal that result, if not to improve it. Improving, we know, is going to take time.
 
“So going backwards is not great."