Lando Norris admits that he is still having to adapt his driving to extract lap time from McLaren’s latest Formula 1 car despite being satisfied with the team’s progress.
McLaren completed a remarkable turnaround last season as Norris and team-mate Oscar Piastri went from battling to avoid Q1 eliminations to landing top-three results.
But while he amassed seven podiums to record his most successful season in the top flight, Norris conceded that he still wasn’t comfortable at the wheel of the MCL60.
Although he accepts that McLaren’s 2024 challenger is a step forward from its predecessor, the Briton reveals that the MCL38 still retains tendencies against his liking.
While Norris had the edge in the intra-team McLaren battle in Bahrain, Piastri had the measure of Norris in Saudi Arabia last weekend and leads the pair in the standings.
“I think we’ve made some good steps in many areas and I think just pure development steps like every team would be making, but in terms of us as McLaren and the characteristics we’ve had as a McLaren car, definitely not as much as what I wanted and was hoping for over the winter,” Norris expressed.
“But that’s completely known between everyone and there’s really good progress going on.
“We came to the test with plenty of things to try and stuff to tackle these weaknesses but not enough things to say I think this is easily the route that we need to go down.
“So we still have a lot of work going on to try and tackle these areas because it’s the larger areas that will make me be happy to drive the car, that will allow me to extract more time out of the car, be more consistent and just to make the car quicker in general.
“So it’s kind of a win-win-win if we can improve in these areas, but obviously it’s proving to be something very difficult to do.”
“So am I completely satisfied with that? No, but am I happy with the progress that we made over the winter in general? Yes.”
With the margins compact among the quartet of teams behind Red Bull, Norris believes that minute developments will also be critical to the Woking squad’s prospects.
“Some of these things are minor things. There’s things that make a couple of hundredths in different areas there,” he said regarding McLaren’s timeline for new parts.
“Thing is when there’s like three or four of these things, it could make a couple of hundredths of difference so maybe you can talk about a tenth.
“When you’re talking about a tenth, you’re already talking about a good step. There are things everyone’s going to be doing every weekend.
“You bring little things which are a bit lighter, a bit more efficient, things of that type but every team is doing that.
“So of course we’re trying to make ours bigger and more efficient in all of those things but those types are not things that are attacking the team. They’re just kind of a background development item which make the car go quicker, so those are things that are coming every weekend, and some bigger ones for further down the line.”
