“McLaren lean on me a little more,” Lando Norris indicates his team favors his opinions over Oscar Piastri’s
Lando Norris has outlined how McLaren takes his inputs into consideration while developing their racecar.
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Only a couple of years since their baffling third-place finish in the Formula 1 2020 season, McLaren are now lagging at the very bottom of the grid. With only 14 points to their name till now, the Woking-based outfit is fifth on the points table. At the recently-held Miami Grand Prix, Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri were both eliminated in the Q1 sector at Saturday’s Qualifiers since the MCL60 simply failed to keep up with the machines of the rival teams at the street circuit. This has raised a few eyebrows regarding what Zak Brown‘s team is doing in relation to developing their car.
Five races into the 2023 F1 season, McLaren has only managed to get both their racers into the top 10 only once–at the Australian GP. And Lando Norris also managed to score two points at the Baku GP with a ninth-spot finish. But these dismal results have disappointed the fans of the British team, and raised some questions regarding the flaws in their car development. But the papaya squad’s senior racer Lando Norris, who has stuck with the team ever since his F1 debut in 2019, has claimed that the team indeed works on their upgrades, giving massive weightage to his opinions.
In the previous years, McLaren had recruited Carlos Sainz, then Daniel Ricciardo, and now Oscar Piastri to team up with Lando Norris. Through this entire time, the Briton has stuck to the papaya squad and thus, he has more knowledge of their cars than his current F1 debutant teammate Piastri. Hence, he said, “Maybe they [McLaren] lean on me a little bit more for the knowledge of how we were in previous years, to look at the development from last year to this year and things like that.“
Lando Norris elaborates on the process that McLaren use to develop their car
Lando Norris is current in his fifth year with McLaren, and by now, he has gotten used to the way the team works. And his teammate, Oscar Piastri, is completely new, so the onus of the decisions falls upon Norris when the team needs the drivers’ inputs to make developments in their car.
The Belgian-British racer has elaborated on the methodology they follow at Woking, saying, “You both give your sides of the feelings and the story of what’s going on to the car, what you want from the car – which aligns very well. I wouldn’t say we [Lando and Oscar] have the same driving style, but our comments and complaints are generally always the same.”
In other news, Lando Norris is now gearing up for delivering McLaren’s best performance yet at the upcoming Monaco GP. The Woking-based team has the most number of wins at the historic racing circuit, with 15 victories between 1984 and 2008. But ever since then, the papaya army has not been able to secure any win till date.
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Riddhi Mondal
(1821 Articles Published)