Norris not satisfied with McLaren efforts to fix car inherent weakness

While McLaren finished the 2023 F1 season with the second fastest car behind Red Bull, the start of their 2024 campaign has been solid but far from impressive.

Following a major mid-season upgrade, McLaren put a painful start of the 2023 season behind, and ended up fighting for podiums and poles towards the end of the season, but in 2024 they are fighting Mercedes for the third best team status after two races.

Speaking after the 2024 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, and quoted by Sky Sports F1, Norris admitted he is not completely content with the progress done with the team MCL38.

"I think we've made some good steps in many areas, just pure development steps like every team would be making," he said, "but in terms of us as a McLaren and characteristics we've had as a McLaren car, definitely not as much as I wanted and was hoping for over the winter.

"But that's known between everyone and there's already good progress going on," he pointed out. "We came to the [Bahrain] 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've still got a lot of work going on to try to 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 that's obviously proving very difficult to do. So am I completely satisfied with that? No. But am I happy with the progress that we made over the winter in general? Yes," the Briton maintained.

With F1 now heading to the third race in Melbourne, all the teams will start to bring more upgrades to their cars, and McLaren is no exception, but Norris revealed there will be no major updates.

He said: "Some of these things, they're minor things that make a couple of hundredths difference here and there.

"The thing is when you have three of four of those things which make a couple of hundredths of difference, maybe you can talk about a tenth, and when you're talking about a tenth, you're already talking about a good step.

"They're things that everyone is going to be doing. Every weekend you bring little things that are a bit lighter or a bit more efficient and things of that type, but every team is doing that.

"Of course we're trying to make ours bigger and more efficient and all of those things, but those types are not things that are tackling our biggest weakness as a team at the minute.

"They're just kind of background development items which help the car go a bit quicker," the McLaren driver concluded.

Norris finished sixth and eighth in the first two races of the season, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, respectively. He now has 12 points and sits in eighth in the F1 Drivers' Championship.