Lando Norris Sounds the Alarm on McLaren's 2025 F1 Car As Major Concern Exposed

McLaren's Lando Norris revealed an area of concern on the 2025 MCL39 F1 car, which team principal Andrea Stella has termed a problem that is "inherent" to the Bahrain International Circuit. The Papaya outfit overhauled its new challenger despite the sport entering the last year of regulations and got into test mode during the Formula 1 pre-season testing, which got underway on the 26th of February and ended on the 28th at Sakhir.

F1 on SI reported Norris' assessment of the MCL39 after the second day of testing, where he mentioned that while the car ticked all the boxes, the rear section's stability required improvement. He said:

“It feels similar, which is a good start. That’s where we wanted to start.

“We’re not looking at absolute, outright performance and if we went into qualifying now, I’m sure we would change some things, but a lot of today and yesterday has been just ticking the boxes.”

He added:

“The fun bit will be this afternoon and tomorrow morning but I think if we want to improve anything at the minute, it’s still the rear of the car. The more you can improve the rear, the more everything just gets better.

“But the rest of it feels correct, and it feels like it’s in the same ballpark, and that’s what we want."

While Stella agreed that Norris' assessment was fair, he expressed that he would be surprised if the car didn’t experience "rear-end and traction limitations" in Bahrain. He explained that the Bahrain International Circuit’s layout inherently challenges a car's rear stability. However, he stressed that while these issues might not be fully resolved, their impact could be significantly reduced. He said:

"So I think the comments of Lando related to the rear instability are fair.

"At the same time, when you come to Barahin, I would be very, very surprised if you didn't have rear-end limitation and traction limitation, somehow, these limitations are inherent to the circuit. [sic]

"They were an objective of our development, and according to what we have seen in the data, through what we've added in car development, if anything, we think we have improved from this point of view, but you improve by a quantity that is never going to make these kind of problems disappear.

"The only time I saw something change as dramatically was like: 'Oh, there's no problems with traction anymore, now the car actually pushes on in traction' was when we had the exhaust effect back in 2011 and 2012.

"I remember with my previous team (Ferrari), we introduced the exhaust effect from one session to the other, and the car had no problems with traction anymore, itt's a dramatic change of aerodynamic behaviour. [sic]

"But within what you can do, inside the scope of the regulations, which are fixed, you are always going to suffer the same limitation, but ultimately, you need to try and reduce those limitations more and more."