McLaren driver Lando Norris has revealed that a six-year-old issue with his McLaren F1 car remains unresolved, a problem that impacted his performance during the pivotal Las Vegas Grand Prix. The race saw Max Verstappen clinch his fourth championship title, decisively defeating Norris in the Drivers’ Standings by a margin of 63 points.
With the Las Vegas Street Circuit notorious for its graining issues, Norris pointed out that the front tire graining was a key factor affecting his MCL38 F1 car’s performance. The Briton expressed that, without the graining problem, the car has the potential to deliver top positions. While he finished sixth in the race, his teammate Oscar Piastri finished one place behind in seventh.
Norris also acknowledged Mercedes’ dominant 1-2 finish on the Strip, confirming the need for significant improvements to the car. He expressed optimism that the team could refine the car to enable him to push confidently, even on tracks where it isn’t the fastest but still capable of delivering strong results. Speaking to the media, he said:
“I don’t think of those things, I think how bad our car was today. That’s what worries me.
“Mercedes being strong, how poor we’ve been all weekend. Clearly we’ve a lot of work to do with our car, it’s too difficult to drive, it doesn’t work in these conditions.
“It doesn’t work in many other tracks where we’ve had similar conditions, but we’ve been able to get everything out of it sometimes.
“Even when people think we’ve had the best car, we’ve absolutely not. We still won some of those races.
“Those were the great weekends but this weekend, even if I feel like I drove pretty well, I couldn’t have got anything more out of it.
“And if I tried I probably would have ended up in a wall somewhere.”
Addressing the graining problem, he added:
“It’s been a complaint of mine for the last six years and again we’ve still not been able to iron it out and get it out enough from our car.
“Some tracks that are more limited or certain things, these issues don’t arise but we’ve always been one of the worst teams for front graining.
“I feel like I’ve driven very well in those races such as Mexico.
“When we do our front graining, we’re not the quickest car but as soon as the front graining is gone, we have a car that’s quick enough.
“When you can manage it to a certain extent, we can survive. Today, we couldn’t manage it enough.
“The problems were way too severe and they’ve been just as bad in many other races even like Montreal. Montreal, we were killing the fronts. A similar case, low grip, street circuit vibe.
“Mercedes, easily the quickest, easily should have won. We were struggling. They were fast.
“A similar thing this weekend. There are traits. We have weaknesses in the car.
“They’re ones I’ve been saying for a while but they’re ones which are very difficult to get out of our characteristic of a car. It’s something we’re working on a lot.”