McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella has revealed a “hypothesis” for the qualifying mistakes that Lando Norris made in the latter stages of the season. The Briton was frustrated with his one-lap performances at several events towards the end of the campaign. At the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, Norris complained that he was doing a “s***” job on Saturdays as he felt a mistake cost him another high-starting position on race day. The 24-year-old was particularly vocal in Qatar as he felt mistakes in both the sprint and Grand Prix qualifying sessions denied him a duo of pole positions. Norris even expressed disappointment with his lap during sprint qualifying in Brazil, which was the fastest of the session. The 13-time podium finisher admitted that the MCL60 car wants to be driven in a style that differs from his natural inputs .
Stella asserted that there may well be a deeper technical reason behind the batch of mistakes in the second half of the year. "That's an interesting topic,” he told media including RacingNews365 . “It's not an easy one to describe with some good engineering behind it. It requires a bit of interpretation. "It's often difficult to understand where is the driving element, and is there an engineering element? Is there a characteristic of the car that just makes it so peaky, so unpredictable, in some circumstances? "Certainly, in our debrief, we [discovered] the fact that recently, we have had some driving issues that look to be more frequent than normal. "So is there anything that we need to look into - not the famous McLaren characteristics, but in this development, which certainly gave grip, have we embedded some elements that possibly [mean] the car is just losing too much grip too rapidly in some conditions? "This is a hypothesis. It's nothing to do with evidence, but you kind of work by hypotheses, so that you can look into the data, look into the information with a key. "And that's certainly a key that we will be using in the coming days to look into what are we learning from these situations."
Most read
