Lando Norris said McLaren “need to improve the car quite a lot” after finishing fifth in the season-opening Australian Grand Prix, admitting he was “struggling with a lot of things” during the race.
With team mate Oscar Piastri having spun off on his way to the grid, Norris was McLaren’s sole runner. Starting sixth, the Brit stayed in the top-10 fight but could not match the pace of the leading Mercedes and Ferrari cars. He held off late pressure from Max Verstappen to take fifth at the chequered flag, but called the afternoon “tough.”
“[It was] tough, of course, trying to learn on the go and understand things – difficult, not an easy thing to try and understand and to maximise,” the 26-year-old said. “But I think we learned through the race – we clearly did because at the beginning of the race we were pretty slow. At the end of the race we were, I think, a little bit better and a bit more competitive, but comparing to Max, comparing to the cars ahead, not even close. We have a lot of things to look into, to try and understand, and I think we have to understand the power unit more, but that’s what today was for and we’ll see what we can learn for next week.”
Norris added it was not just the power unit that needs attention. “But it’s clear today that we also need to improve the car quite a lot – to be honest I would say it’s more about the car than just the power unit, but I need to go and look at the data and understand things a little bit more. It was difficult with the car and I was struggling with a lot of things. We’ll look at stuff and see what we can improve.”
Despite the challenges, Norris believes there is time for McLaren to close the gap. “There’s a lot of time,” he said. “I guess after the last few years it just hurts a little bit more, but I’m happy for George [Russell] – he’s done a good job. Also Mercedes and Ferrari, they’re doing a good job, they’re doing better than we have. We need to learn, we need to understand quickly, but it does take time sadly – even though things are quick, it takes time and we’ll do the best we can.”