Why Norris says McLaren is not yet a top F1 team

Lando Norris has said the wait McLaren is having to endure before its revised car arrives later in the season shows how is it not yet operating like a top Formula 1 team.

McLaren sustained an underwhelming opening to the new season in Bahrain, with the team sitting bottom of the Constructors’ Championship following a pointless race.

Before pre-season testing had even got underway McLaren’s top brass had conceded it had failed to achieve the development goals it had set out with its MCL60 car.

However, it was confirmed that the Woking outfit hoped to have a substantial upgrade package ready in time for the fourth round at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix to rectify the shortcomings.

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Pressed on whether the Baku updates could be determined as the real dawn of McLaren’s season after a difficult start Norris responded: “I hope so.

“But at the same time, the season will start now, it’s as simple as that. As much as we want to believe that it’s starting later, it’s starting now. We’re behind where we should be and where we want to be.

“What we’re going to be having in Baku should be what are starting the season with if we want to be a top team, it’s where we should’ve started the season with those kind of parts that are coming.

“Until then, we’ll just do the best we can to make the most of what we have now. That’s the same as every other team and what their objectives are. No matter where we are, if we’re 10th, if we’re 15th, we’re optimistic that we can make progress later on in the season.”

McLaren’s failure to deliver on the targets it had outlined for its launch-spec car had materialised from an internal decision to change its development direction late in 2022.

Norris has professed he was aware of how tough the beginning of McLaren’s season would be extremely early on.

“Three months ago? We knew then exactly the car we were going to have, how much downforce we were finding and so on,” the Brit exclaimed.

“You always have a reasonable understanding on where your own cars are going to be, you just don’t know what everyone else is going to do and how much they’re going to find. Some of the teams have found a lot, some of the teams have found not that much.

“I think we’ll still have a better start to the season to where we were last year. It’s a step in the right direction, but we’re not happy with [being the] sixth-best team, seventh-best team, whatever.”

He added: “We want to be taking steps forward and not in any way taking steps back. I guess it’s always going to be a hard season until you get to the top and even when you’re at the top, it’s still going to be a hard season.”

Over the winter McLaren parted ways with its former team principal Andreas Seidl to allow him to take up a position at the Sauber-owned Alfa Romeo side to oversee Audi’s integration into F1 in 2026.

Seidl was immediately replaced in-house by Andrea Stella, who was promoted from his previous role as Executive Director, Racing.

Following the British squad’s relegation to fifth in the teams’ standings in 2022, Stella outlined McLaren’s overall aim for 2023 was to recover the fourth spot it ceded last year.

McLaren is hopeful the construction of a new state-of-the-art wind tunnel and simulator can return it to the position of competing for race wins on a regular basis from 2025.

Although Stella has confirmed it will be able to utilise its new facilities as early as the middle of this year, Norris has asserted the team must do better with its current resources.

“We have the plan, we have a lot of what we need. Of course, we still know that the wind tunnel is coming, the simulator is coming – two things that will definitely help us take a step forward. We need to do more with what we have now already,” Norris cautioned.

“At least see some progress and end the season in a better way than when we started and see progress from the things we have coming. That’s what we want to achieve as a team, where we want to end as a top four team.

“I think that will give us a big, big boost of confidence going into 2024 when we have part of the car set up in the new wind tunnel, some of it will already have been started,” he continued. “We can be more confident going into the end of the season.”