Stoffel Vandoorne is to take on a different chassis at this weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix in a bid to combat his recent problems with McLaren’s MCL33.
Vandoorne spent much of the British Grand Prix weekend mired at the rear of the pack, a trend that continued in Germany, where he was last in both dry practice sessions and in qualifying.
McLaren confirmed in Germany that an unidentifiable loss of downforce was compromising Vandoorne’s prospects, and attempted to address the problem, to no avail.
Expanding on the situation, Vandoorne said: “We have swapped the chassis yes. It’s not a brand new one, it’s one we’ve used before, but that’s not a problem at all.
“I arrive here fresh, start from zero, the team put in a lot of effort to try and understand the problems we had.
“Hopefully tomorrow we can spot nothing [wrong] as that means the two cars [Vandoorne’s and Fernando Alonso’s] are going to be good.”
Vandoorne explained that the situation first arose on his first practice lap at Silverstone where there was just no grip. No grip. Everywhere.
“You start thinking about everything you know but at some point there were sessions where I couldn’t even match Fernando at one corner anymore.
“Then you know that if you can’t even match one corner there is a problem on the car, and it felt like that as well, at Silverstone it felt like something was really wrong, and there was nothing to do about that.”
Vandoorne’s issues came off the back of a difficult run of form, with the Belgian now on a stretch of seven Grands Prix without a top 10 finish.
“The team saw already from Silverstone that there was something going on,” said Vandoorne.
“But it was hard to tell it is a chassis-related issue. At the moment we haven’t driven the car yet so we don’t know yet but we’ve done everything now to remove the doubt let’s say.
“For them it was clear to see on the data that something was going on, but it was hard to know exactly what part was causing it.
“First we started to change a lot of the bits on the car and make sure there was nothing wrong with the build, but whatever we did it still had the same problem.”
