NEOM McLaren sporting director Gary Paffett says that the team’s new driver pairing of Mattias Ekstrom and Cristina Gutierrez “exceeded expectations” at the Extreme E season opener in Saudi Arabia.
The duo – Ekstrom the 2023 runner-up and Gutierrez the 2022 champion – joined in the off-season as McLaren looked to move on from being underachievers to championship challengers, and Paffet says it was a strong start to the team’s new era.
“My overall feeling from the weekend is really positive,” he told RACER. “We knew what Mattias and Cristina could do from looking from the outside at other teams. Now we’ve got them here, they’ve certainly lived up to and in some ways exceeded expectations.
“They’ve both been incredible in the car – Cristina just with her calmness under immense pressure and her ability to fight so close to people, and the moves that she makes on track. Her racecraft is really good. And Mattias with his creativeness, as always, opens up gaps that you don’t know that are there. They’ve both really done an incredible job.”
While a podium finish on Saturday and a Redemption Race win on Sunday represents a solid return, Paffett admitted that it hadn’t been plain sailing, with the team quietly battling persistent mechanical issues during the event.
“We haven’t had the smoothest of weekends. We’ve had a lot of problems with the car, and we still haven’t got to the bottom of the problem that we have,” he said. “I still don’t think we were at peak performance there with the car, so there was a bit of work to do.”
On Saturday the team grabbed its first podium since last May’s Hydro X Prix in Scotland, thanks to a genius move by Ekstrom who entered the first corner on the opening lap several meters wide, only to use the subsequent momentum to power up the inside in the second phase of the turn. It was a move that Ekstrom had planned in advance, but one that the team didn’t expect to work as well as it did.
“With Mattias you have someone that looks everywhere,” Paffett said of his former DTM rival. “He doesn’t just look from one waypoint to the next, drive there and look at the next one, he looks at the whole environment and where he can make a difference, where he can find a different line, especially in Turn 1 and things like this.