McLaren’s solution to help Lando Norris in F1 qualifying

Lando Norris’ struggles to get a feel for the 2025 McLaren at the very edge of the envelope, particularly in the top-10 shootout in qualifying, have been one recurring theme over the first half of the season as he is needing to pull out all the stops to battle team-mate Oscar Piastri.

From a very early stage Norris noticed this year’s car is providing him with much less feedback – through the steering wheel and other areas – on how it will react to his inputs, making it hard for him to attack corners at the very limit during qualifying laps; a technical term referred to as cueing.

That front axle ‘numbness’ is a general car characteristic that Piastri has also noticed, albeit to a lesser extent, with the Australian relaying to the team in Miami that he found it hard to replicate his best qualifying lap because he wasn’t entirely sure how he got there. But Piastri has largely been able to perform untroubled compared to Norris, notching four poles compared to the Briton’s two.

In order to fix a problem you first need to understand the underlying causes. While adding aerodynamic load to a car is one thing, solving mechanical issues can be much trickier as they are harder to replicate in the virtual world, and the MCL39’s handling traits clearly affected one of its drivers more than the other, making it a more subjective matter.

Norris spent a lot of time in the Woking simulator between the Saudi Arabia and Miami rounds in April to gain a better understanding on where this lack of front axle response actually comes from, and the team has since worked on gradual, subtle solutions, culminating in a revised front suspension geometry that Norris successfully trialled in Canada earlier this month.

To protect its intellectual property McLaren has understandably been coy on sharing details, but speaking to the media ahead of Friday practice in Austria, technical director Neil Houldey explained the process behind getting Norris in tune with his machine again.

Lando Norris, McLaren

Photo by: Steven Tee / LAT Images via Getty Images

“It’s just about for him to be able to feel the tyres on the limit a bit better,” Houldey said. “We’ve just made some small kinematic adjustments that we know will be better. I think we’ve got a good understanding of what he needs and we were 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.

“We weren’t expecting a big difference in performance, we were expecting it to be better and it was only just checking that Lando had no negative comments about that change. That meant that we’ve taken that forward.”

That process hasn’t been straightforward because McLaren initially noticed that its proposed solutions for Norris came with some potential downsides and trade-offs too, so it had to be careful not to make its championship-leading car less potent overall while chasing a more responsive front end for its driver.

Further evaluation has now given the team enough information to ensure that’s not the case and that his suspension design is here to stay, while Piastri is likely to stay on the original specification.

“We had some concerns in one area. They had some small negatives that we didn’t necessarily want to introduce at the start of the year,” Houldey revealed. “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 would be any worse.

“With all of these things we’re trying to find the best of a number of different scenarios, and it was the same with the suspension. You’re just trading things to try and find the optimum performance, which for Lando we think we’ve now found.”

Lando Norris, McLaren

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Sutton Images via Getty Images

McLaren introduced further parts around the front end in Austria as well, including revised front suspension fairings, although that is purely an aerodynamic benefit that should work in unison with both versions of its suspension. Both drivers are expected the latest specification from Saturday onwards.

McLaren qualifying head-to-head

On Thursday Norris admitted the number of mistakes he is making compared to Piastri, which now also includes running into the Australian in Canada, is the biggest and potentially title-deciding difference between the two right now.

And while Norris has now become more and more confident in his car in qualifying thanks to both the work he has done and changes the team has implemented, he has been the first to admit that the number of errors he is making is down to more than just his front end struggles.

Norris was left chasing after Piastri in Montreal after a messy qualifying session left him seventh on the grid, with his disappointing Q3 performance was not related to anything else than just trying too hard and going over the limit.

Read Also:

But he arrived in Austria upbeat about his chances to starting reducing his 22-point gap to his team-mate.

“The suspension is more something to try and give myself a better feeling, rather than to unlock any more performance from the car. But hopefully a better feeling can in some way unlock performance,” he said on Thursday.

“That’s certainly an area that I need to improve on and we’re working on quite a lot to improve on, but if there is any track to give myself the best feeling, it’s probably here. From both a personal side and from a team side, from trying to improve the car and look at the improvements that I need, this is certainly a good opportunity.”