Carlos Sainz says McLaren is still trying to understand the cooling issue on his MCL35 as he remained beset by the problem in Spain despite taking on a new chassis.
McLaren had to open the bodywork on Sainz’s car at Silverstone last weekend, compromising his performance, and for the upcoming round in Barcelona changed chassis in a bid to eradicate the problem.
Sainz Jr. finished seventh on home turf on Friday but cut a downbeat figure amid the ongoing strife.
“At the moment we have not really solved the issue,” he said.
“We still see some discrepancies across the two cars. With my car we have less cooling and we are still having to run with more cooling on the car, which costs quite a lot of lap time around here.
“So still not fully into the bottom of the problem. And we have changed pretty much everything on the car. So we are starting to run out of things to try.
“Hopefully we can find a last thing or main thing which will give us the final answer. But at the moment it is tricky.”
Sainz Jr. also believes that McLaren, fourth in the Constructors’ Championship, is giving away pace to some of its midfield rivals in race spec.
“The single lap pace was not that bad,” he said. “The long-run pace needs a lot of work because we see teams like Renault and Racing Point being quicker than us.
“So we need to keep working, keep finding little issues that we normally have on the race, and see if we can first solve the cooling issue and then find a bit more performance in the long runs.”
