Norris reflects on 'silly' struggles he's confident will be 'ironed out' by McLaren

The McLaren driver won the season opener in Australia and leads the world championship by five points from teammate Oscar Piastri, who has won twice this season.

In Bahrain, Lando Norris finished third after starting from sixth due to a qualifying mistake. Despite the podium finish, Norris was disappointed with a scrappy race overall. He was compromised by a five-second time penalty after overrunning his gridspot, was forced to return a position after overtaking off track, and failed to overtake George Russell after locking up heavily at turn one.

When asked about last weekend, Norris stated: "I think if you look back to Bahrain there's the start, there's the overtaking off the track which I think is more just tough luck and that's racing. There's then the mistake in qualifying and things, but there's, from a driving point of view and the qualifying stuff, there's more the reasoning for why some of these things are happening, which comes back to some of my struggles," he began to GPblog and other media present in the paddock.

The Brit continued, explaining that he's feeling specific differences between McLaren's 2024 and 2025 challengers. "There's the things I've come talking about and the struggles that I'm having to feel the limit of the car, and understand the limit of the car, which is completely different to last season. And just not allowing me to drive in the same way with the same abilities that I could perform at a very, very high level last season. But there's also those sillier things, like the snap out of turn one.

"Especially in a qualifying lap the one thing you want to avoid is a snap out of one because the tyre temperatures are up and the rest of the laps just going downhill, so it's both, but a lot of these things will kind of get ironed out over time if we can just fix the core and the start of these issues," Norris concluded at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit.