Lando Norris admits McLaren have not yet made as much progress as he would have hoped to eradicate the lingering weaknesses in the team’s car for 2024.
McLaren and their new MCL38 car have made a solid start to the new campaign with two double points finishes and a best race finish of fourth so far with Oscar Piastri last weekend in Saudi Arabia.
The team sit ahead of Mercedes in third place in the early Constructors’ Championship – a world away from the predicament they were in this time last year when they were 10th and last with zero points.
But in a season they have targeted further closing the gap to the front after finishing 2023 as a form team behind Red Bull thanks to a stunning mid-season development push, McLaren’s new car is yet to scale those heights yet with the world champions continuing to dominate and Ferrari the season’s early second-quickest team.
Speaking at the season’s second round in Saudi Arabia about the progress McLaren made over the off-season, Norris said: “I think we’ve made some good steps in many areas, just pure development steps like every team would be making, but in terms of us as a McLaren and characteristics we’ve had as a McLaren car, definitely not as much as I wanted and was hoping for over the winter.
“But that’s known between everyone and there’s already good progress going on.
“We came to the [Bahrain] test with plenty of things to try and stuff to tackle these weaknesses, but not enough things to say, ‘ok, this is easily the route that we need to go down’.
“So we’ve still got a lot of work going on to try to tackle these areas because they’re not just areas that will make me be happier to drive the car, but it 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 that’s obviously proving 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.”
Norris, who claimed six runner-up finishes in the final 13 grands prix of last season but is still awaiting his first Grand Prix win after 106 starts, has opened the new campaign with finishes of sixth and eighth.
Speaking about the updates that McLaren have planned for the next phase of the season, with the Australian GP next up on March 22-24 live on Sky Sports F1, Norris said: “Some of these things, they’re minor things that make a couple of hundredths difference here and there.
“The thing is when you have three of four of those things which make a couple of hundredths of difference, maybe you can talk about a tenth, and when you’re talking about a tenth, you’re already talking about a good step.
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McLaren drivers Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris reflect on their Saudi Arabian Grand Prix
“They’re things that everyone is going to be doing. Every weekend you bring little things that are a bit lighter or a bit more efficient and things of that type, but every team is doing that.
“Of course we’re trying to make ours bigger and more efficient and all of those things, but those types are not things that are tackling our biggest weakness as a team at the minute. They’re just kind of background development items which help the car go a bit quicker.”
McLaren team boss Andrea Stella said at the launch of the MCL38 in February that some development projects had not been completed in time for the initial version of the car and that it would be a “matter of time” before they were completed.
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