Lando Norris Exposes McLaren’s “Shocking” List of Shortcomings While Issuing a Thunderous Message to the Team: “Still a Lot of Work to Improve”

Lando Norris is experiencing a rollercoaster of race results in the current campaign. The state of the MCL was extremely poor during the pre-season testing and the first two races. However, Norris finished 6th in Australia and 9th in Baku, sparking some hope. Then came Miami and another horrendous result for the team. So, what could be the reason behind the topsy-turvey race result from the McLaren man? Norris might have an answer.

The MCL60 isn’t completely devoid of hope, and the team is taking small steps in the right direction. That seemed to be the case until the Miami GP, where both McLaren men finished at the bottom of an incident-less race. How does McLaren improve performance and get back into points? Well, speaking on the F1 Nation podcast, Norris had an answer, but it’s also reliant on third-party factors.

“It’s not that it’s not clear how to improve it. It’s still a lot of work to improve it and a lot of time. I think it’s very clear,” said Norris. “It shows how track-dependent or track characteristic biased it is, temperature biased as well. If it was a much colder day, our performance for sure, 100% would’ve been much better, relative to other teams. I’m sure they would’ve done better but we would’ve taken a bigger step.”

Read More: Lando Norris & McLaren Walk On Thin Ice as Dwindling F1 Performance Turns Worse

He then backed his opinion with an example from the weekend. The Belgian-British driver said, “Like FP2 on Friday, we maybe showed a little bit more pace. But even when we take that out of it, our pace was actually still not too bad. Whereas when went into qualifying, like a 20° hotter track temp, we were shocking.”

The track contingent performances will not help McLaren’s case. Although the team is still making consistent changes and improvements to get consistent results throughout the calendar and not depend on the track conditions. However, this scenario requires a lot of patience, and Norris is agitated.

Lando Norris makes an honest confession about his patience toward the Papaya team

The Brit has been a loyal and consistently performing servant of McLaren since 2019. All this dedicated service toward the common goal hasn’t yielded many rewards and Norris no longer wants to be patient.

“It’s not like we were over the moon in Baku, we just had a better weekend and we’re happy because of it,” said Norris, disregarding the weekend in Baku. He then revealed the plan and his patience with it, “But the plan, the work, everything’s still the same, it has been the whole year. We know where we’re bad, where we have to improve, and just have to be patient still. As much as I don’t want to be patient, we have to be patient.”

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Norris is running out of time and patience with McLaren. Behind the ever-present smile, there is a frustrated F1 driver who wants to live up to his potential. If McLaren doesn’t improve in the coming races and the year, Norris might look for other options on the grid.