Norris dissects frustration with Mercedes engine amid customer team struggles

The reigning world champion, who spoke to GPBlog at the circuit in Shanghai, noted how healthy the synergy within the McLaren team and Mercedes HPP has been, while pointing out that any performance gaps between Mercedes engine customers are largely due to the season still being in its early stages.

“We always do that. We've worked very closely ever since, and they've helped us achieve the last couple of championships together, you know, so it's certainly not like that's never happened. It's just early in the season, there's a lot of things to try and figure out and understand,” Norris explained.

The McLaren driver, however, stressed that it’s natural for teams to seek their own advantages, and McLaren is no exception as it continues to adapt to the new power unit.

Norris further highlighted that much of the remaining uncertainty is a matter of rules and internal processes, handled by team principal Andrea Stella and the engineers.

“The rest of it is more about, I don’t know, what the rules are and what has to be said or not, and those kinds of things are down to Andrea and the rest of the team. But we've always worked closely, we’ll continue to do it, and even as he mentioned some of these things, there were still a lot that we didn’t explore or maximise ourselves,” Norris noted.

The British driver added that the team needs to focus on executing better and figuring out the intricacies of the new power unit much earlier, which would translate to improved results.

“So it’s kind of irrelevant at the same time. If we just do a better job ourselves, maximise the data, and figure things out earlier, we would perform better anyway,” he said.

“The fact that we didn’t have access to the newer power unit earlier meant that we were always on the back foot compared to a team performing extremely well and much more prepared than we were. We just want to be more prepared, and that’s the main focus,” Norris concluded.

McLaren team boss Stella earlier admitted the team has largely been reactive to the elements and performance of the Mercedes power unit.

The Italian motorsports chief noted that the Woking-based team is still far from reaching the level of power unit execution shown by Mercedes during pre-season testing and at the Australian Grand Prix.

Want to stay up to date with the latest events from the F1 paddock? GPblog’s Paddock Update is the place to be.

Follow and subscribe to our channels on Spotify and YouTube so you don’t miss a scoop as the action continues to unfold from the Shanghai international circuit in China.

Check out the latest episode of our Paddock Update here 👇