McLaren’s Lando Norris claims the team know their problems, the fix not being simple, after struggling at the 2022 Formula 1 pre-season test in Bahrain.
McLaren had a good start to the 2022 F1 campaign in Barcelona, their brand new MCL36 impressing on it testing debut around the Spanish venue.
In Bahrain however, the team struggled with reliability, mainly brake issues, that kept the car confined in the team garage for long spells, while parts flown in on the final day of testing failed to solve the problem permanently.
That meant the team has to be confined to short runs on lower fuel in order to work around the problem, and Lando Norris, who was at the wheel of the MCL36 for the whole three days of testing – filling in for Covid-struck Daniel Ricciardo – admits to the inconvenience of the situation speaking to F1’s official website.
“Less than ideal,” was Norris’ verdict of the team’s Bahrain performance. “It’s not been the smoothest of tests for us. It’s been quite limited in Bahrain. I think Barcelona was a good one but here we’ve encountered quite a few more problems, which have limited the amount of laps we’ve done by quite a huge amount.
“[We’ve had problems] especially on the long runs – the lower-fuel and shorter runs we’ve been able to do – but not the high-fuel runs,” the Briton explained. “We’re behind where we want to be, where we need to be, and where we can say we’re confident in any way going into the first race.
“It’s not great but we’re getting through as much as we can. We’re definitely making progress, but definitely not in the position we want to be in,” he lamented.
Finding the fix takes a lot of work
Norris admits that despite being on top of the problem, the perfect fix will not be straight forward, especially with less than one week before going racing in Bahrain, the season opening race.
“I think we are on top of it,” he said. “We know what the problems are, we know what we are suffering with, and so on. Coming up with the perfect fix is always the question of: ‘do we have that or not?’
“That’s what we’re unsure about until we get to next week and we put it all together,” the 22-year-old admitted. “The team are working hard to understand the problems, obviously why they happened in the first place and why we encounter them, and then work on the fix for next week.
“But it’s not a simple fix; it’s quite a complicated area, it takes a lot of work, a lot of time to come up with these parts and so on and that’s why it’s the challenge to get it all here and in a good condition for next week,” Norris concluded.
Despite their struggles with reliability, McLaren seem to have a good baseline with the car to start with, as former driver and pundit Martin Brundle placed the Woking squad fourth on his predicted pecking order for 2022.
This time next week we race! ?
That feeling. ? pic.twitter.com/c9jOPblCKg
— McLaren (@McLarenF1) March 13, 2022