The McLaren team suffered from brake cooling problems during last week’s Formula 1 pre-season testing in Bahrain, and its program was badly affected as Lando Norris failed to complete long runs.
These problems were compounded by the absence of Daniel Ricciardo during the three days of testing because he tested positive for COVID-19, leaving Norris at the helm of the Woking car.
Although new parts were introduced on the last day of testing, the team had to rush to get a new design in the factory for the first race of the season, however it is due to be replaced by a third version.
“It’s clear that the brake ducts are quite complex parts if you look at the F1 car as a whole,” said Andreas Seidl when asked by Motorsport.com about the changes to the brake duct design.
“So it was a race against time to be able to bring, I’ll call it a workaround, this far. It’s definitely not the final design.”
“But we did what we could, the factory has not stopped in the last seven or eight days to provide us with the solutions that we have now in the cars, which we have to evaluate in practice.
“Hopefully it will allow us to get back to normal, to get our rhythm back, which we lost a bit in the last test. And then we’ll go from there.”
Seidl believes the team has done the best job possible in the short time it had between testing and the start of practice for the Bahrain GP.
“I think the most important thing was to understand where the problem was from last week as quickly as possible. I think the problem has been identified fairly quickly within the team. And now it’s about correcting it,” he said.
“As I said before, we have a provisional solution available for this weekend. So we have brought the car that we could with the time that was available and I am sure that with the steps that we have proposed, both now and the following, the issue is resolved.”
Asked about the possible performance difference from changing the original design, he said: “We still have to quantify, once we’re out on the track, how we can make this stopgap solution work. So it’s too early to judge.”
Norris , meanwhile, admitted drivers will still have to “manage a lot of things” in Sunday’s race, including keeping temperatures under control.
“The team has done an excellent job of trying to get as many parts as possible, things to fix those issues and problems,” he said. “But to some extent we don’t know how well they’re going to work.”
“And we have to put them in the car and go driving with them for the first time to understand how good they are. Is it enough or too much and obviously it better be too much.”
“We can go back and make modifications from there, but it could be an opportunity for everything. It could be a perfect race where there were no problems and of course that’s an ideal world. It could be a race where there are still We have to manage a lot of things.”
