McLaren’s Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri secured impressive positions on the grid for Sunday’s race, thanks to the team’s latest upgrades. However, the McLaren team remains cautiously optimistic, understanding that the high-speed Silverstone circuit and cooler temperatures played a significant role in their success. While acknowledging the positive outcome, the team acknowledges that there is still much work to be done to ensure consistent strong performance across all tracks.
Norris, who narrowly missed out on pole position to Max Verstappen by only two tenths of a second, expressed his thoughts on the improvements made to the car. “We have obviously improved the car,” Norris said. “The overall speed and performance has just taken a decent step forward. But I guess if I was going to be negative, there’s definitely going to be some tracks that we are going to struggle more at. Our weaknesses are still the same, and quite weak. So I think we really need to try and tackle them if we want to be able to be here more consistently.”
While McLaren has made progress in addressing the aerodynamic efficiency issues with their launch spec car, they continue to face challenges with car balance, direction change in slow speed corners, and a weak rear end. These issues result in poor race pace as the tires overheat. McLaren team boss Andrea Stella pointed out that the exceptional pace at Silverstone, along with promising performances in Spain and Austria, was partially due to cooler temperatures and the use of soft tires, which helped mask some of the car’s underlying problems.
Stella stated, “There’s definitely a pattern. High-speed corners, cold conditions, soft tires, and the same compound: C3. So, we like these conditions, our car likes it. The rear end kind of finds naturally some good grip, which we may be missing over continuous laps or when it’s hotter. So conditions come to our favor.”
While acknowledging the improvements made to the car, Stella also highlighted that there is still room for development. “But still, we have GPS overlays, and we can see that some cars are quicker than us. This just confirms what is our objective in terms of development.”
Concerning McLaren’s race pace, Stella added, “While we have improved the car in terms of aerodynamic efficiency, we haven’t made yet large enough improvements in terms of elements that can condition and can improve the race pace.”
Norris echoed Stella’s sentiments, emphasizing that the upgrades have not completely solved McLaren’s main problems. “It’s like 70% not fixed, 30% fixed, just by making the car quicker, adding load, and having better performance,” Norris explained. “I think 70% at the minute is more that if we just had more load, more of it will be covered. But it’s not the whole solution.”
However, Norris believes that days like today demonstrate that McLaren is not far off from resolving certain issues. He acknowledged that certain characteristics and handling have been persistent challenges for the team over the past five years, and they continue to struggle with them.
McLaren’s latest upgrades have shown promising results at Silverstone, but the team is aware that challenges still lie ahead. While improvements have been made to the car’s aerodynamic efficiency, there is still work to be done to enhance race pace and address underlying weaknesses. McLaren remains committed to tackling these issues to ensure consistent performance across all tracks.
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