McLaren upgrades 'biased' towards Lando Norris F1 car feedback

Some of McLaren’s F1 car upgrades have been tailored to address Lando Norris's confidence issues. 

Both Norris and teammate Oscar Piastri have complained of “numb” feelings in the MCL39, prompting McLaren to test a revised front suspension last time out at the F1 Canadian Grand Prix.

McLaren have made further changes to the geometry of their front suspension and reworked aerodynamic devises on both the front and rear corners to boost stability and overall performance.

“I'm not going to go into too much detail, but you'll have seen, up and down the grid, that there have been a number of changes on the rear suspension of the cars, really, suspension kinematics,” McLaren technical director, engineering, Neil Houldey explained to media including Crash.net at the Red Bull Ring. 

“This event, we've just added something that we think will add a little bit more stability to the rear end, mainly in corner entry.

“It's just an area of development, when aerodynamics become very difficult to gain performance from that, we've been involved with and are continuing to evolve the performance of the car.”

A solution for Lando Norris’s struggles?

Houldey confirmed some of the changes McLaren have made are aimed at solving the car feel problems Norris has reported ever since the start of the season.

“There's obviously a lot more detail that we get in the debriefs from Lando, I think we've got an understanding of what he needs to improve the car, and some of the upgrades that we've got have been biased towards his comments,” he said.

“As you'd expect, you're trying to work out what the drivers need, and you tailor your upgrades to suit them.

“We’ve got a good understanding of what what he does need, and we're able to make small improvements in a number of areas that will and have helped him over the last few races, and will continue to help him moving forward.”

The upgrades will be available on both cars and McLaren are confident it will cure some of the weaknesses of their 2025 challenger and give their drivers more confidence. 

“We'll be running, eventually, everything on both cars. We're achieving keeping the two cars at a level that's very, very similar,” Houldey added.

“The suspension changes and front wing changes are available for everyone.

“If the analysis shows that it's quicker, and his preference is that, then we can stick with what we've got, or we can upgrade the car. It just depends on what data we get from the sessions, but our expectation is that we're taking our performance upgrades forward.

"With all of these things we are trying to find the best of a number of different scenarios and it was the same with the suspension.

“We were concerned in one area, we worked out that wasn’t a concern during the season and you are just trading things to try and find the most optimum performance, which for Lando, we think we’ve now found.”