McLaren with ‘a lot of pace to find’ to score points in Bahrain – Norris

Lando Norris admits McLaren have “a lot of pace to find” just to score points after a difficult Friday at the Bahrain Grand Prix.

The Woking-based team has struggled since arriving in the Middle East after discovering problems with their front brakes during the second pre-season test.

A series of fixes have been developed to try and reduce the problem, including new brake ducts that were developed and flown to Bahrain this week and used for the first time in practice.

“I think today is a step forward for sure. I just don’t know how big a step forward it is yet,” Norris admitted on if the issue had been resolved.

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“We’ve only been here and not other tracks, so at the moment you’ve just got to say it’s [our] package.

“If it’s not going to be good here, there are a lot of other tracks that are similar to Bahrain.

“So just as a package, we’ve got to improve. We’ll see what we can do tonight and approach it for tomorrow.”

Both McLaren drivers finished well down the field in Practice 1 before Norris improved to P11 under the lights in the second session.

Even so, Lando isn’t sure if points are possible in the season opener.

“We’ve got a lot of pace to find if we want to be competitive with any of the guys in the top 10,” he conceded.

“Today was always going to be a tough day, trying to make up for the lack of long runs that we missed out on last week at the test.

“We stuck to our run plan and can take some positives from the day, but there’s a lot of work to do to be competitive. That will be our aim overnight.

“We’ll go and analyse the data, work out where we can improve and do what we can to get the car in a better place for tomorrow.”

Teammate Daniel Ricciardo is even more at a disadvantage after missing the entire second test with Covid-19 and then losing further track time in FP2, with only 12 laps and the 18th fastest time.

“Unfortunately, we missed out on some running this evening, so we’ve got our work cut out tonight,” the Australian said. “It wasn’t a fix we could do in the session.

“They saw a little bit of a water pressure loss so to get into it it’s basically everything off and we obviously didn’t have time to do it in the session.

“We’re obviously a bit on the back foot,” he said. “I missed a lot of laps last week and would have loved to have got them today but it’s alright.

“We’ve also got some pace to find, but it’s only day one. We’ll keep at it, study the data tonight and try to make up for it tomorrow morning before qualifying.

“I’d like to think that we can definitely get a bit better, but we don’t have bags of sand or anything at the moment. So yeah, we’ve got some pace to find.”

Asked where McLaren needed to improve the most, Ricciardo’s answer wasn’t so encouraging.

“I think honestly, we’re just lacking overall grip,” he replied. “The car feels okay, but obviously when you’re down a little bit on grip, you do struggle a bit more and lock a wheel here or there and make a few errors.”