Norris: McLaren is tackling one big problem on its car this year. Can they be competitive?

The pre-season tests looked absolutely great. At least the first one in Barcelona. But then came testing in Bahrain and last week’s grand prix at Sakhir, which didn’t go well at all for McLaren. According to Lando Norris, there’s one big problem plaguing the British team…

Lack of downforce – that’s the thing that’s currently bothering Norris and Daniel Ricciardo, and indeed the whole of McLaren.

And according to Norris, the grip problem in this year’s MCL36 is quite fundamental. Given that the balance of the monopost is not bad at all and there doesn’t seem to be any other problems on the McLaren, the team will focus all its efforts on the downforce area associated with the braking problem.

“We don’t have too many problems, but at the moment there’s one big one, which is downforce. Grip is something that is very important in the world of Formula 1 and it’s something that we are struggling with at the moment. It’s something we need to work on,” said Norris ahead of the start of the race weekend, as quoted by Motorsport.

“I think we started the new season with a very decent car (Norris is referring to the Barcelona test – ed.), but we didn’t make much progress on it because it was a car that looked really, really good and we understood how to optimise it quickly,” he explained.

The 22-year-old McLaren driver is confident that the engineers and technical director James Key will be able to come up with sufficient improvements over the next few races.

It should be noted that the downforce issues are closely linked to the problems around the brakes that McLaren are currently addressing.

In fact, the fact remains that the team has so far been unable to get into a workable temperature window as their brakes often overheat.

This also results in the tyres overheating and it’s quite possible that McLaren will have to come up with a completely new and different concept, but this in turn may affect the aerodynamics on Ricciardo and Norris’ cars somewhat more significantly.

The British Woking stable, however, has a solid team of engineers and very capable staff, plus this problem is solvable, although its final solution may be a long time coming.

“Our team is already working on a good plan to put things back together. We are trying to understand where the mistake was made and what we missed,” Norris concluded.

Sources: McLaren F1 Team, Motorsport