McLaren is wary that the Formula 1 upgrades in 2023 that transformed its campaign could have introduced some negative handling traits amid an increase in driver mistakes.
Having begun the season battling to score points with an underdeveloped car, the launch of McLaren’s revised MCL60 elevated the squad into a regular podium contender.
That substantial raft of new parts at the Austrian Grand Prix was followed by further updates in Singapore, enabling McLaren to pip Aston Martin to fourth in the standings.
But while the Woking-based camp amassed nine podiums and a Sprint victory in Qatar, Lando Norris was made to rue several qualifying errors during the closing rounds.
The Briton believes he squandered an opportunity to grab pole position in Qatar before also criticising himself when a slide in Abu Dhabi cost him a front-row starting spot.
Although Norris was critical of himself in both instances, McLaren boss Andrea Stella admits its development push could have instigated bad behavioural characteristics.
Speaking after qualifying in Abu Dhabi, where Oscar Piastri also battled imbalance, Stella pondered: “It is often difficult to understand where is the driving element or is there an engineering element? Is there a characteristic of the car that just makes it so peaky, so unpredictable in some circumstances?
“Certainly, in our [qualifying] debrief we were right in the fact that recently we have had some driving issues that looked to be more frequent than normal. Is there anything that we need to look into?
“Have we embedded in this development, which certainly gave good grip, some elements of possibly the car is just losing too much grip too rapidly in some conditions?
“This is an hypothesis. This is nothing to do with evidence. But you kind of work by hypothesis so that you can look into the data, look into the information with a key. That’s certainly a key that we will be using in the coming days to look into what are we learning from these situations.”
Norris denied that McLaren could have usurped Red Bull at the Yas Marina Circuit, highlighting the team’s ongoing weakness in slow-speed corners against its closest rivals.
However, Stella contended that the British outfit also spurned lap time on the straights due to its old-spec rear wing set-up failing to exploit the top-end boost provided by DRS.
“We are happy with what we see in terms of top speed. If anything, we know that we have left some work to do on the DRS effect, especially on the wing we are using,” he noted.
“It is a wing that comes from a relatively old design in which we couldn’t address the DRS effectively.”
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