Hidden Lando Norris issue revealed as McLaren deficit uncovered

SEPANG – McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has revealed Lando Norris has been losing time in a straight line, costing him up to two tenths per lap in qualifying in Sepang.

Norris and Oscar Piastri qualified sixth and seventh respectively for the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia, though an extra two tenths for Norris would have seen him third on the grid, once Isack Hadjar takes a five-place grid penalty.

Lando Norris ‘struggling a lot’ as straightline speed deficit revealed

Stella emphasised that both drivers were “very fundamentally on par” during Q3 on Saturday, as evidenced by a gap of just 0.005s between the McLaren pair in qualifying.

However, data has shown that, in Norris’ case, minuscule differences in speed have cost him – something which the reigning World Champion noticed himself after the session.

“I felt like my lap was very strong,” he told PlanetF1.com and other media in Sepang.

“It’s tough; I’m more happy because I’m still struggling a lot in the straights everywhere. I’m just down on every single straight so, every time I get a good exit, I’m just slower at the end of the straight, and it just hurts seeing this every single time.

“I should be higher up, not because I could have done a better job necessarily, but just because we’re not getting everything out of the car that we need to, and that doesn’t make my life tough today, but obviously makes it tough for tomorrow.”

The McLaren team boss expanded on the subject further after qualifying and made clear that he is not attributing this issue to the team’s Mercedes customer power, rather that this deficit could come from a variety of factors.

As a result, this is a subject the team will look to address properly ahead of the next race – though this has been an ongoing problem over the past couple of races for the McLaren driver.

“We see that, in the power-limited section, the car accelerates a little less and develops a little bit less top speed, all the other parameters being the same,” Stella explained.

“We talk about probably between one and two kph. They are small quantities. They are even difficult to see, but we see [it] statistically, and we should more precisely talk about the deficit of straightline speed, which we can quantify in a lap time loss that I would say in excess of one tenth of a second, possibly between one and two tenths of a second.

“A different conversation is about why that is, and while we can talk immediately about a lack of power, in reality there can be different reasons.

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“It’s, in a way, more difficult to monitor what is happening from a power unit point of view, because if it was deployment, we would be able to see it possibly has to do with some other parameters, but at the same time, there are behaviours of the power unit that depend on what’s happening on the chassis side, and finally there could be parameters that have to do with the drag of the car.

“At no point we are making a point about power unit, we are just making a point about a lack of straightline speed, which we want to make a point about, because it’s fair to Lando that we take the responsibility for the fact that on his car there’s a lap time deficit, which at the moment we have not been able to remove in a couple of events.

“Obviously, we are definitely looking at all the possible parameters, and we will look at further changes, but we only can do them now for Singapore.”

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

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