McLaren has witnessed how its form during the first part of the 2022 season was the closest thing to a roller coaster, with very disparate performances between the different events held to date, going from not even being able to fight for the points in Bahrain to get on the podium with Lando Norris in Imola.
At last weekend’s Miami Grand Prix, the young Briton was forced to retire after a collision with Pierre Gasly’s AlphaTauri, while his teammate Daniel Ricciardo could only hope for a poor 13th position after suffering more than expected on the hard tyre.
Norris admitted after the race that McLaren “didn’t lose too much” by retiring, as the best result would perhaps have been eighth position as the pace of the Mercedes cars and that of Valtteri Bottas’s Alfa Romeo could not have aspired to nothing better.
Next weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix, which takes place at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, will be a good sign for McLaren as it returns to a track where it put in a truly competitive performance in pre-season testing.
Norris acknowledged being “more optimistic” when thinking about the MCL36’s possible performance at the upcoming Barcelona round, but also explained that they needed to find more performance if they really want to compete with Mercedes and Alfa Romeo .
“Hopefully we can make some more improvements to the car. It’s hard to predict exactly how we’re going to perform from this weekend. We’re behind Mercedes and also behind Alfa Romeo . But I think we’re on par with Alpine. and AlphaTauri .”
“Haas is also more or less there with us. So it’s very even in that area. Overall, I’d say we’re in fifth or sixth position.”
“We have a pace that is decent, but we need a bit more to be able to fight the Mercedes and the teams that are ahead. If we can get that then we could be happy.”
The performance of F1’s midfield teams has varied a lot during the first part of the season, depending largely on the characteristics of the track.
McLaren principal Andreas Seidl noted that all the teams were trying to discover the main weaknesses of their new cars in the first few races, meaning that the specific conditions of each track would lead to big changes in overall performance.
“It’s still early to get everything under control with these new F1 cars,” said Seidl.
“At the moment, all the teams are working on the weaknesses of their cars, I think we have seen that on tracks like Miami or Bahrain, we definitely struggle more than on circuits with other characteristics like Melbourne and Imola.
“We are aware of our weaknesses and that is why we are working hard at the factory to fix these issues. That is what we have to focus on now,” concluded the McLaren sporting director.
