McLaren boss Andrea Stella has indicated that the changes the team plans to make to its 2025 Formula 1 car to help Lando Norris might take a while longer to come.
Norris’ season has unravelled somewhat since he was victorious in the season opener in Australia as he hasn’t returned to the top step in the subsequent four rounds.
The Briton conceded prior to the second event in China that his natural driving style hasn’t been compatible with the successor to the championship-clinching MCL38.
That has been exposed over recent weeks as errors in qualifying in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia – where he crashed in Q3 – have resigned him to damage limitation races.
However, Stella divulged that McLaren is working on revisions to the car that should help to address the initial difficulties that Norris has experienced with the MCL39.
“This is something that the team can solve,” Stella said in Jeddah earlier this month.
“This is something that the team are trying to, if you want, put on a clear and precise engineering basis so that the tests and the new parts that we will bring will be exactly the ones needed.”
Were McLaren changes to Norris’ detriment?
Stella explained how the radical tweaks McLaren has adopted have helped it be more competitive across the board in 2025, but could have come to Norris’ detriment.
“Some aspects of the car that we changed from last year to this year made the car overall more performant, and it’s also a car that performs across all kinds of circuits,” he elucidated.
“And this is thanks to some of the changes we’ve made. But they are quite structural. They are embedded in the layout of the car.
“So it’s going to be some work, but it’s work that not only we want to embrace because it will improve the comfort of both drivers – and I would say especially Lando – but it’s also good learning in terms of understanding the design even of next year’s car.”
But while the regulations are changing in 2026, Stella insisted that improvements McLaren makes this season could provide some valuable lessons for the long term.
“While being very different from a technical regulations point of view, some aspects of how the driver drives the car actually remain valid despite the change of technical regulations.
“I think that’s important: actions to improve this year, but also to improve the way we design cars for the future.”
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