Eric ‘the believable’ Boullier defends himself against those who question his leadership skills in the McLaren team. Boullier believes he is the right person to keep at Woking.

McLaren is essentially run by three individuals, Zak Brown recently took a greater role but his primary concern remains the commercial side of the team. Matt Morris handles the factory side and Erik is the racing Director and responsible for the teams speed and performance at the race weekends. The Frenchman hires the team members and takes overall responsibility for the direction of the car concept.

Rumour and utterings within the team are starting to question the quality of that leadership and doubts remain since the recent dismissal of Tim Goss.

And yet Boullier is convinced that he is the best man to lead the team, strongly defending his position to the Spanish media yesterday.

“Yes, I believe it, in the past I have managed, revitalised and restructured several teams, and I have won with all of them in all categories, I know my job, we have to make sure that we can do it.”

Thus far, Boullier has only achieved a podium with McLaren in Australia 2014. He has overseen the worst years of the teams history during its failed partnership with Honda, in 2015 to 2017. Clearly for 2018 the team has taken a mild step forward but is still far from getting close to Red Bull, which is capable of wining races with the same power unit.

Since the sacking of Goss, Boullier has not ruled out further dismissals in management roles saying:

“I believe in the people we have, I believe in the managers, you always want strong leadership, good combination, be as flexible as possible, they look like generic words, but we do have to address our issues if we think we have left some. ”

“We know what we have to do, we have to improve in reliability and performance, now there are other teams with the same engine, so we have references, it’s a long road, this has been another step, a good job has been done to recover the reliability from the tests. “