Lando Norris struggled with a number of issues with the car in Baku, but even setting that aside, he believes that Sepang should go better for McLaren
Following a disappointing weekend in Baku, Lando Norris expects McLaren to return to their usual form in Malaysia. The upgrades introduced recently had, in principle, worked as planned, but last weekend several factors came together that masked the car’s true potential.
“All the upgrades are doing exactly what they’re supposed to,” Norris clarifies. The fact that McLaren still failed to impress in Baku was therefore not necessarily down to the new parts. “We struggled in various areas,” explains the 2025 World Champion. For Norris, the focus was primarily on the power unit.
A clearer picture should therefore emerge in Malaysia. Norris expects the upgrades to perform better at the Sepang International Circuit and for McLaren to get closer to the level of performance the team is usually capable of.
Is Malaysia a better venue?
“I expect them to work better here and for our pace to return to normal to some extent,” says Norris. However, he adds that this will depend on resolving “some of the issues” that plagued his car in particular in Baku.
He also believes the track characteristics favour McLaren. Although Sepang has numerous long straights – on which Norris does not currently consider his team to be among the strongest – there are fast corners that should suit the MCL40 better.
¿pbfs||pb¿“There are a lot of straights, which, as we know, aren’t one of our strengths and are something we need to work on,” says Norris. “But hopefully the faster corners will suit us a bit better this weekend.”
This means Malaysia could already be a better indicator of McLaren’s true potential than Baku. There, Norris not only had to contend with the track’s characteristics but also with some power unit issues.
Power unit problems made Norris’s Baku weekend more difficult
“I had a few problems with my power unit, which made the weekend much, much harder for me,” explains the Briton. The disadvantages really added up on the straights in particular: “When you’re lacking power, the battery simply works much less efficiently because of the speeds on the straights.”
As a result, Norris used up more battery power and had to deploy it earlier. “The less power you have, the worse everything gets,” he says. Together with Mercedes, McLaren must therefore understand what went wrong last weekend.
For Norris, however, this explains only part of the difficulties in Baku. Even setting that aside, he sees areas where McLaren is not yet on a par with Mercedes.
“There are things that Mercedes manage to do well, which we struggle with,” says Norris. The team must now work out whether Mercedes simply has a better understanding of these areas or whether the rival has capabilities that McLaren lacks.
Added to this is aerodynamic drag. Norris does not currently consider the McLaren to be the most efficient car and therefore sees work to be done in the long term as well. “From an aerodynamic point of view, we need to improve things in the long term so that we can make the car more efficient and, under certain circumstances, optimise it more for top speed on the straights,” he explains.
