Earlier this year Sainz signed a contract with Ferrari, as a replacement for Sebastian Vettel who’s leaving to Aston Martin with the end of this season. In a usual setting the driver that is moving to another team is usually left out of any type of technical and development discussions, in order to avoid spreading of the information to another team, but McLaren does not see any danger in their current situation. 

McLaren is currently third in the Constructors Championship, and in order to keep that place for the rest of the season, they need to work very closely with their drivers, even the ones that are supposed to leave the team in a few months time. 

As said by Andreas Seidl, the team principal of McLaren, during the Tuscan GP: “At the moment, Carlos is still fully involved in everything we are doing here at the track and also back home. We clearly have the philosophy that that's the right way forward in order to get the maximum out of Carlos also. In the end, we share the same goals this year. He wants to get maximum points and results, and the same is happening on our side. That is valid for us as a team. And to be honest, I think we will go ahead like this until the end of the season.”

In the early stages of the season, another team principal said that the team was not worrying about the possibility of spreading information. It was Cyril Abiteboul, the team principal of Renault, who admitted that there’s no worry with Daniel Ricciardo’s move to McLaren because from 2021 McLaren will switch back to the Mercedes engines. 

As he said: “With the way that the structure is, that the cars are more or less frozen between this year and next year, and also McLaren will have to use all their tokens on the pure chassis/engine integration, so no performance development there, that will give us the opportunity to work extremely normally with Daniel. The only thing is he won't be exposed to 2022. But frankly he would not be anyway, because it's still a bit far away from a driver perspective, even though a substantial part of our workforce is already on to 2022.”

Although out of the three teams McLaren is in the best position, and is also the highest in the standings, we can see why the principals do not worry about the possibility of the information leak. McLaren needs all they can to be able to sustain their 3rd place, and Ferrari and Renault definitely have a long way to go themselves to be even able to fight for the 3rd place.