Lando Norris admits that McLaren F1 is taking far too long to return to the top teams in F1.
For the British driver, who is very impatient, there is still a glimmer of hope: the spectacular turnaround during the 2023 season.
But for someone who has been waiting since 2019 for an easy-to-drive and fast McLaren, the fact remains that the MCL60 was catastrophic coming out of winter.
When asked if he’s starting to find the wait too long as he seeks his first victory, he is philosophical.
“It’s hard to know what’s too long and what isn’t.”
“This is Formula 1, and some things move fast, so you would say, ‘Have we done a good enough job?’ and you would have to say, ‘No, we haven’t done it over the last five years’.”
“‘Have we achieved the goals we wanted? No, but in 2023, did we achieve the goals we aimed for? Yes, we probably exceeded our expectations.”
McLaren’s Struggle for F1 Speed
“But there are certain reasons why we couldn’t do it, and a big part of that was simply launching a fast car in the first place, starting with Bahrain.”
“That’s the problem, we haven’t managed to build a car fast enough, and even if it’s impossible to drive but fast, we didn’t even have that.”
“Now, we’ve reached a stage where we have a fast enough car, we can start to tweak certain things. Because when you have a slow car, when you move things around, the focus often falls on the wrong area.”
“We need aerodynamic loads, then handling rather than handling and then loads.”
“It’s been too long that we’ve been waiting for this, in an ideal world it would already be there, but these things happen, just look at how Mercedes has struggled over the last two years.”
“Given where they were for the past six or seven years, you would think they had the best understanding of how to make a F1 car work – and they just haven’t aligned the right things, so it shows how difficult it is.”
McLaren’s long wait for F1 success: Norris’ thoughts 2024. McLaren’s long wait for F1 success: Norris’ thoughts 2024.
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