McLaren boss Zak Brown has accepted that the team is “years away” from being able to compete for overall honours in Formula 1, in the wake of this week’s managerial reshuffle.
McLaren has not won a title since 2008, is win-less since 2012 and has failed to take a podium since 2014, during which period it has switched from Mercedes to Honda and now to Renault power.
McLaren holds only a low-key sixth in this year’s Constructors’ Championship and on Wednesday confirmed that Eric Boullier had relinquished his position as Racing Director.
Brown recognised fellow Renault-powered team Red Bull as a benchmark pre-season as McLaren sought to re-join the front-runners in the wake of its split from Honda.
But Brown has now accepted that McLaren faces a long road in its bid to recapture previous glory days.
“This is going to take some time to fix,” said Brown at Silverstone on Thursday.
“I think we are years away. I don’t know if that’s two or 10, or somewhere in between. Probably more like somewhere inbetween, but I don’t want to get into predictions.
“I think we have to be very realistic and honest with ourselves, with our fans, with you [the media], to say that this is going to be a journey. I think everyone needs to recognise that.
“I think we had a good finish in the last race relative to where we started, but we were uncompetitive.
“Not much has changed since last race, so I think everyone needs to not starting having too high expectations, ourselves included, at Silverstone, because all that has really happened is five or six days have gone by.”
McLaren is 18 points behind fourth-placed Renault, the duo split by Haas, with Force India also firmly in contention for the lead midfield position.
Brown stressed that McLaren will “fight like mad” to wrestle back fourth place from Renault across the remainder of the season.
“We’re in a pretty big fight for fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, all the teams are very close there,” said Brown.
“I don’t want to make predictions. That has got us into trouble in the past, so I don’t want to repeat some of the mistakes we’ve made.
“What I’d like to do and what we are going to do is fight like mad to finish fourth in the championship.
“Whether we’ll achieve that, we’ve seen to, in these last few races, if you’d have looked in Australia, one would say that fourth looks pretty achievable. Sitting here right now, we’ve dropped in the points last race.
“We closed a little bit of the gap to Renault, but the gap more closed on us from behind, so I think that’s got to be the goal, but that’s not a prediction.”
