One of the main areas of focus for McLaren’s upgrades at the Austrian Grand Prix is to try and improve Lando Norris’ feeling with the 2025 car to improve his performance.
Norris has frequently referenced a difficulty with extracting the maximum potential from the MCL39, as the Briton has struggled to get on top of its handling characteristics to the same extent as teammate Oscar Piastri. The Australian leads the championship after an impressive season so far, but with new suspension and aerodynamic components being introduced at the Red Bull Ring, McLaren says Norris’ feedback has been central to the developments.
“There’s obviously a lot more detail that we get in the debriefs from Lando,” technical director of engineering Neil Houldey said. “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.
“As you’d expect, you’re trying to work out what the drivers need, and you tailor your upgrades to suit them, but I think we’ve got a good understanding of 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.”
Explaining what it is that Norris requires from the new parts to be able to be more comfortable in the car, Houldey says mechanical changes that were also made in Canada should also play a part in improving his feeling.
“It’s just about being able, for him, to be able to feel the tires on the limit a little bit better,” Houldey said. “So we’ve just made some small kinematic adjustments that we know will be better.
“They had some small negatives that we didn’t necessarily want to introduce at the start of the year. Running earlier on in the season gave us confidence that, actually, that wasn’t going to be a problem, so we were able to introduce this change without any real concern that it wouldn’t be any worse and should be better.
“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.”
Houldey says all of the new components are also available to Piastri, but that he can opt to stick with the car’s previous configuration if he doesn’t find a performance benefit himself.
