McLaren’s “heavily revised” new floor is only a “tiny” improvement

Lando Norris says the floor upgrade McLaren have brought to this weekend’s Mexican Grand Prix has only made a very slight improvement to his car’s performance.

McLaren said the car’s floor, which only Norris is using, had been “heavily revised.” According to Norris, the floor is working as well as the team expected to, but it has only made a slight contribution to the car’s performance.

“It’s delivering exactly what the team expects,” said Norris after qualifying third for today’s race. “So it helps, but if it was a two or three tenths upgrade, I think it would easily be P1.

“But we’re talking about tiny things. It’s a lot less than probably what people think on the outside. When you talk about upgrades, you normally think of one, two, three tenths, and it’s not even that.”

Norris appeared to be on course for pole position after McLaren topped the times in final practice and he went quickest in Q1 and Q2. But he felt there was no more pace left to find in the car by the end of qualifying, and ended up three tenths of a second off Carlos Sainz Jnr’s pole position time.

“I couldn’t go any quicker,” said Norris. “It’s more, I think, the others just didn’t get the most out of it [earlier].

“Pretty much every corner I was close to locking up and making mistakes. I did that in my Q3 run one, lap [one]. I had definitely nowhere near close to three tenths left in the car.

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“So it was more that they just went quicker. I was at the limit, I got everything out of the car already in Q1 and Q2, which made us look like the ones to beat.

“But honestly, since FP1, Ferrari have been the guys to beat, and Carlos is on top today, so [it’ll be] challenging to beat them.”

The McLaren driver was one of five on the grid who did little useful running on the first day of practice. Norris handed his MCL38 over to Pato O’Ward for the first session, as McLaren fulfilled its obligation under the rules to run an inexperienced driver in his car. All drivers had to spend most of second practice conducting tyre testing for Pirelli.

“I missed obviously FP1, and then [we had] the alternate tyres [in second practice], so I felt like a bit on the back foot. Probably not as much as what Max [Verstappen] was, but not been that comfortable at all.

“I found some good steps into qualifying, and obviously Q1 and Q2 were very good, but I mean, I found the limit very quickly.”

Ferrari won the last round in Austin comfortably. Charles Leclerc took the chequered flag 15 seconds ahead of Norris, before the McLaren driver was given a five-second penalty.

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Norris isn’t convinced McLaren will be quick enough to challenge Ferrari in the grand prix.

“The race pace is always a tough one to know,” he said. “The last few weekends, they’ve been extremely quick and quicker than us. So I don’t have the confidence to say ‘yes, we can just beat them on pace’.”