Reigning world champion Lando Norris has admitted during Formula 1 pre-season testing in Bahrain that Red Bull has stolen a march on McLaren.
McLaren has been quietly going about its business in Bahrain, racking up 261 laps across the first two days of testing in Sakhir.
Finishing the first day on top and second on day two, the new MCL40 looks to have pace, McLaren still in the early phases of understanding the car.
But concerns from rivals continue to swirl over Red Bull’s apparent advantage, particularly on battery power and deployment, with Norris no exception.
Norris cut a relaxed figure at the end of day two, confirming McLaren is still in a data gathering phase, and he is happy with progress.
“I think so,” he confirmed to a question from Motorsport Week on car progression vs simulator data.
“I feel like we made some steps from yesterday to today. The biggest thing is hopefully until next week we can make a bit more progress and make something of all the data we’ve been getting over the last few days
“It has been handling at times better than on the sim, and in some moments maybe not as good, but the correlation between the sim and the track seems pretty decent. I just did my debrief now and there wasn’t too many bits of feedback I needed to give.
“I think the sim team have done a good job with us.
“It’s more important than ever at the minute, the simulator, in utilising and maximising the battery side of things, which runs correctly, and also trying to improve the car at this stage of the year.”
Red Bull ahead of Lando Norris and McLaren
Confirming Red Bull is enjoying an energy deployment advantage, Lando Norris explained where he and Mclaren need to plug the gap to its main rival.
“There might be some little things I can do better, but that’s certainly not going to make the difference to what they’re doing.
“They have a very good power unit by the looks of things. They deploy and have a lot of efficiency.We need to understand how they have that.
“There’s always things I can maybe do a little bit. There’s some things as a McLaren side we can do a little bit, but also from a McLaren HPP side, and Mercedes, I think that they know there’s certainly areas we need to improve.
“The Red Bulls seem to have done a very good job and the Ford powertrain seems to be very strong, so fair play to them. But at the minute, they’re a good step ahead of us.
“It’s tricky. Also, Australia is a very different track at the same time.
“But when someone just has a deployment advantage, that’s just a beautiful bit of lap time to have in your pocket.
“Without trying, you can just go quicker. We’ll see.
“Also from a car point of view, they seem to be performing well and we don’t seem to be quite at the level of the Ferrari either at the minute.I know we are going to improve and we’re going to make steps forward, but I’m sure they are as well. We have to wait and see.
“There’s no point in trying to guess these things.We’ll do all the work we can and maximise our efforts at the minute. But we’ve got a pretty big step to make to be confident of beating them, that’s for sure.”
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