McLaren headed into the 2024 Formula One season following a remarkable recovery last year.
They started out the season with a car that was struggling to score points. By the end of it, nine podiums and a sprint win with Oscar Piastri in Qatar had been achieved. They also pipped Aston Martin to P4.
However, an area where the Woking-based team has struggled in recent year is unique handling traits and characteristics on their cars that has made them extremely difficult to drive.
Since Lando Norris made his debut in the sport in 2019, the Brit, Carlos Sainz, Daniel Ricciardo and Oscar Piastri have not hidden how tricky the team’s various machines have been to drive over the last 5 seasons.
A weak front end, unpredictable balance and at times a general lack of downforce has made it very tough for the drivers to predict what the car will do next and have the confidence to take it to the limit.
Speaking in his media session in Saudi Arabia on Thursday, Lando Norris admitted they have not made as much as progress on this as he had hoped — but the 24-year-old is happy with McLaren’s overall improvements with the MCL38.
“Yeah, 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 a 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. But that’s 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, ‘OK, this is easily the route that we need to go down’.
“So we still have got a lot of work going on to try and 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 they’re obviously proving being very difficult to do.
“So am I completely satisfied with that? No. But am I happy with the progress that we’ve made over the winter in general? Yes.”
During the 2023 season, Andrea Stella and McLaren admitted that low speed performance was a weakness on the car throughout the campaign.
Although they brought three update packages from Austria through to Singapore, the slow speed issues remained. Suzuka was a prime example — they were mightily fast in the first sector and could match the RB19 — but they struggled in the hairpin and final chicane against Max Verstappen.
Oscar Piastri admits there isn’t any particular surprises with the way the 2024 challenger is behaving on the circuit.
“I mean I think we’re pretty comfortable with where the car is at to be honest. I think the things we have tackled we have noticed an improvement on, things that we haven’t really been able to tackle, understandably we haven’t really been able to fix.
“So I think there’s not been any major surprises in the way the car is behaving, just the things we want to tackle will take more time, so it’s not completely unexpected, that’s for sure.
“The car is doing everything from certainly a numbers point of view that we expect it to do and from a driving point of view, pretty much what we expect, even if we want some things to be a little bit better.”
Piastri is hopeful these characteristics can be slowly erased with updates during the season, but it’s very much a wait and see process.
“We hope so, I mean even last year we hoped that some of the upgrades would improve the characteristics, it maybe improved it slightly.
“But once you get used to it and start pushing the limit again you find either the same limitation just at high speed or a slightly different one.
“Last year even though we improved the car massively in terms of lap time, in terms of feeling it was pretty familiar the whole year.
“So we’ll just have to wait and see I think.”
