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McLaren boss Andrea Stella has shut down Lando Norris's criticism that there was too much focus on bringing upgrades to the car. Norris believes that the team ended up being way off the mark with the setup for the race in Spa due to that.
In Belgium, the team had a rare off weekend. Progressing with a setup that was almost unique to McLaren, both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri ran with a high downforce wing. While this wing did help in the damp conditions on Friday and Saturday, the race on Sunday was in dry conditions.
The dry conditions caught out Lando Norris, who was overtaken one by one by multiple cars. The driver was able to salvage a P7 but felt the team might have been too focussed on bringing upgrades that the race weekend execution suffered.
McLaren's team principal shot down the suggestion and revealed that the misstep from the team was not having a low downforce wing in place. As quoted by PlanetF1, Stella said,
"In perfect hindsight, we could have tried to find some other solution to reduce the drag on the car. I’m not sure how much efficiency would have shed, [how much] we would have removed off the car. It could be that we couldn’t have been able to achieve yesterday’s [Saturday] results if we had made this choice so obviously for a dry race, you do want to race with less drag."
He added,
"I don’t think there’s a correlation between the fact that we were focused on the upgrades and then the decisions on setup that you make once you are at Spa. The real correlation is the fact that because we were very busy on working on other things, we didn’t have the time to work on low drag real wings. So that’s the real correlation. All the rest is not correlated with the fact that we were busy developing the car.”
What had Lando Norris complained about?
Lando Norris had talked about how the team needed to rethink its approach. The wing level used was too far off the mark and that compromised the weekend to a great extent. He said,
“We just need to rethink how we approach the weekend. The wing level and stuff like this might work on [this circuit], but it doesn’t work on all of them. And we clearly got it wrong. All of the focus was on doing [the upgrades], which is the correct thing to do.”
The P7 in Spa broke Lando Norris' run of consecutive P2 finishes that he had achieved in Silverstone and Hungary.
