Why McLaren can’t yet pinpoint the car changes that have caused Norris’ 2025 struggles

Pinpointing the exact causes of Lando Norris’ struggles with McLaren’s 2025 Formula 1 car is proving difficult for the team, given the wide-ranging changes between the MCL39 and its predecessor.

Norris has long not enjoyed certain quirks that determine how McLaren’s lineage of cars need to be driven, especially in low-speed corners. As the team made a great step forwards over 2024, which propelled Norris into a regular race winner, the Briton also felt more and more connected with his car.

But, while McLaren has started off 2025 on the same strong footing that it finished last season with, and Oscar Piastri has evolved with the team to make another step in performance, Norris has now found it much harder to gel with the team’s new machinery, and McLaren isn’t quite sure how to fix it yet.

The reason why there has been such a dramatic swing in form – and with it driver confidence – despite these stable regulations is that McLaren has made sweeping changes to its car to try and retain its advantage, rather than go for the safe route.

That appears to have paid off at large, as McLaren has won three out of the first four races, but it looks like it has thrown Norris off his game too.

After last weekend’s Bahrain Grand Prix, Norris was characteristically harsh on himself for not helping McLaren get an expected 1-2 win behind Piastri, with team boss Andrea Stella vowing the team would shoulder some of the blame and help the 25-year-old gel better with his equipment.

But that is easier said than done, with McLaren’s technical director for performance Mark Temple explaining that Norris’ struggles are so nuanced and sensitive that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly which year-on-year design change is causing them.

“It’s an interesting point and it’s one that we’ve been discussing a lot with Lando,” Temple said in Jeddah. “Of course, he’s an extremely talented and finely tuned driver and athlete. He’s very sensitive to the car and that shows in his performance.

“What that means is that we don’t know precisely which of those changes [is causing it]. We know what we changed with the car but, if you’re working out what the contribution to that lack of feeling completely dialled in is, it’s hard to know.

“That’s something we’re discussing at length with him, looking at the data, understanding the changes we’ve made, and it’s very much there’s nothing obvious that you can say, ‘Yeah, that’s all we need to change.'”

McLaren also needs to tread carefully because any drastic changes it may choose to make to help Norris could also come at the expense of the car’s ultimate performance potential, which Piastri currently has less trouble exploiting with his different driving style.

“We really need to get into the details and then take a very considered, careful approach to make sure we don’t throw away performance from the car or do something which actually makes it harder for him,” Temple cautioned.

“We’ve obviously had a look at the last couple of races, some minor changes may help, but I think it’s also for him to look at the driving and understand himself how the car behaves.”

There doesn’t appear to be one single area Norris is struggling with either, explaining after taking third in Bahrain that he has found it much harder than last year to know what the car is going to do in each corner.

“I’m not able to do any of the laps like I was doing last season,” said Norris. “Then, I knew every single corner, everything that was going to happen with the car – how it was going to happen. I felt on top of the car.

“This year, I could not have felt more opposite so far. Even in Australia, whether or not I won the race, I never felt comfortable. The car was just mega and that’s helping me get out of a lot of problems at the minute, but I’m just nowhere near the capability that I have.

“I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what’s changed from last year to this year. Is it me? Is it some of the car? It’s complicated. But I’m not doubting myself, even though sometimes it may seem like that.”