McLaren reveal ‘hypothesis’ for Norris qualifying mistakes

McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella has revealed a “hypothesis”for the qualifying mistakes that Lando Norris made in the latterstages of the season. The Briton was frustrated with his one-lapperformances at several events towards the end of the campaign. Atthe Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, Norris complained that he was doing a“s***” job on Saturdays as he felt a mistake cost him anotherhigh-starting position on race day. The 24-year-old wasparticularly vocal in Qatar as he felt mistakes in both the sprintand Grand Prix qualifying sessions denied him a duo of polepositions. Norris even expressed disappointment with his lap duringsprint qualifying in Brazil, which was the fastest of the session.The 13-time podium finisher admitted that the MCL60 car wants to bedriven in a style that differs from his natural inputs . Stellaasserted that there may well be a deeper technical reason behindthe batch of mistakes in the second half of the year. "That's aninteresting topic,” he told media including RacingNews365 . “It'snot an easy one to describe with some good engineering behind it.It requires a bit of interpretation. "It's often difficult tounderstand where is the driving element, and is there anengineering element? Is there a characteristic of the car that justmakes it so peaky, so unpredictable, in some circumstances?"Certainly, in our debrief, we [discovered] the fact that recently,we have had some driving issues that look to be more frequent thannormal. "So is there anything that we need to look into - not thefamous McLaren characteristics, but in this development, whichcertainly gave grip, have we embedded some elements that possibly[mean] the car is just losing too much grip too rapidly in someconditions? "This is a hypothesis. It's nothing to do withevidence, but you kind of work by hypotheses, so that you can lookinto the data, look into the information with a key. "And that'scertainly a key that we will be using in the coming days to lookinto what are we learning from these situations."