Lando Norris thinks that given McLaren’s poor performance in the pre-season testing, the team will have to fight against Haas.
Lando Norris thinks that apart from the three leading teams, all the other teams are quite behind. After facing the brake-related issues in the new MCL36, Norris feels that the team might have to consider last year’s backmarker Haas as their rival.
Norris ran all three days of testing as his teammate Daniel Ricciardo tested positive for Covid-19. Due to the problems that he faced with the car, he couldn’t do as many laps as the team wanted to. McLaren, even, finished bottom of the mileage charts across the three days of running.
Busy three days of testing. Now let’s go do the real thing. pic.twitter.com/bQZA3h26sZ
— Lando Norris (@LandoNorris) March 13, 2022
On the other hand, Haas set the second-fastest time overall. Norris said, “The three teams there are looking the fastest at the minute and I would say everyone else is looking pretty close, from us, down to Haas.”
He was surprised to see Haas perform so well considering they were at the bottom of the track last year. Norris was impressed to see the progress Haas has made so far.
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Lando Norris unsatisfied with McLaren’s testing result
Furthermore, seeing Haas’ performance in the testing, Norris feels that his team will have to compete against them in the upcoming season.
The Briton said that even though Mclaren was able to gain some understanding of its new car but it is still behind in terms of performance.
The car is facing problems with older tyres and higher fuel. “It’s been so-so, could have been a lot better, definitely wasn’t our smoothest of tests, the problems made our life difficult to do the laps we wanted to do,” said the McLaren driver.
“We could do one-two-lap runs so we understand the tyres when they’re new and fresh but when they’re older on high fuel we don’t understand as much because we didn’t have the chance to test it.
“[It was] good, but many areas we’re behind on compared to other teams that we’ll have to focus on next week,” he further added.
