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McLaren’s “painful and disappointing” form in the Bahrain Grand Prix is expected to continue as the team confronts the reality it is “a long way off” at the start of the 2022 Formula 1 season.
After topping the first day of testing at Barcelona, where it had an encouraging start to pre-season, McLaren’s new car has proven to be more troublesome than expected.
It suffered front brake cooling problems that badly limited its mileage in the second test in Bahrain and, at the same track last weekend, the team had a clear lack of performance in the season opener.
Daniel Ricciardo and Lando Norris each ran in last place during the race and eventually finished 14th and 15th, giving McLaren a point-less start.
Team boss Andreas Seidl said “we know we have an issue on the performance side, which is disappointing and painful” and Norris – who signed a new long-term deal with McLaren prior to the start of the season – said that will be the case in the short-term.
“I’m expecting pain and I think everyone needs to know there’s going to be a bit of pain,” Norris said.
The MCL36 was said to be working as expected aerodynamically and mechanically in Bahrain but simply lacking grip.
Norris said the car is “a long way down on downforce” and that he expected McLaren’s race “looked as bad as what it felt” inside the car.
It marks a major step back from where McLaren has been in the last couple of seasons, occasionally scoring podiums and re-establishing itself as the best team in F1’s midfield.
“It’s just where we are, quite simply,” Norris said. “We just have to get a little bit used to it now.
“Of course over the last few seasons there’s a lot of expectation from us within the team but also from everyone else watching and so on, and we just haven’t got it right at the minute.
“We’re a long, long way off. Not just a little bit, we’re a long way [off].
“So we’ve got to start afresh and figure some things out, find solutions.
“Solutions don’t mean next week we’re gonna be amazing, but in the months to come we need to understand what’s going on and how to get better.”
Norris’s stark assessment of McLaren’s plight came soon after the race and is perhaps a more emotional perspective.
But if he is right then McLaren is in danger of falling a long way short of its expectations for 2022.
“It’s obviously a very challenging situation for the entire team starting this new era with this completely new car completely on the back foot,” admitted Seidl.
“But I think it’s also a moment where we have to show how far we came as a team that we actually can deal with the situation and get us out of the situation.”
Norris complained of a poor-handling car in the race and said that made it tricky to get the tyres working properly.
But Ricciardo reckons it’s not “massively out of balance, we’re just lacking overall grip”.
His hope is that means McLaren has a good base car it just needs to add downforce to.
“If we just find the numbers that will translate into a decent car but obviously for now we just don’t have the same numbers as the front teams,” Ricciardo said.
“What still fills me with some optimism is it’s completely new cars obviously for everyone this year.
“Some teams have found a really good chunk. Maybe it’s just we keep trying a few things with set-up and we’re like, ‘oh, that turned the car on’.
“We’re still optimistic we might find something even in set-up, maybe not even in an update, so let’s stay hopeful for that.”
McLaren’s poor Bahrain GP was not just down to a lack of performance. Both drivers had to manage certain elements through the race that forced them into further compromises.
Ricciardo was asked to cool the right-hand side of the car from the first lap, while Norris had a similar instruction later in the race.
This is thought to be in addition to the brake temperature troubles that afflicted all teams and that McLaren was managing with an interim fix to the problems that blighted its pre-season test here.
It is little surprise McLaren suffered in this regard given it completed no race simulations at the test.
And the situation was compounded by McLaren being the only team to start on the medium tyres, which meant Norris and Ricciardo lost too much ground early on against the others on soft and did not have enough performance to attack when their rivals suffered earlier degradation.
But the team acknowledges that the underlying issue was the pace of the car.
“It’s clear that we have a lack of performance in our package,” said Seidl.
“It definitely looks like this track here has exposed us to the weaknesses our package is having quite a lot.
“But in the end it’s also clear our ambition must be to have a competitive car on all old kinds of track layouts and that’s what we have to focus on.”
Norris said he hopes this is “as bad as it gets” but if not he has backed his team to find a solution in the end.
He said: “We’ve still got a whole season of development and figuring things out but it’s just not easy to do so.
“Once we figure out what’s going on and what’s wrong then it’s all about implementing it and bringing upgrades and bringing those parts to the car.
“Figuring out is the hard part. Putting things in the windtunnel, all that kind of stuff. But it could come a third of the way through the season, halfway through the season, three quarters.
“I don’t want to believe it’s not going to be at all this season. I have faith in the team that they’ll be able to do it.
“They’ve done it the past few years. We just need to step back and re-look at everything and go again.”
