"Amazing race really" - Lando Norris' self-loathing response to performance in 2022 F1 Bahrain GP

Lando Norris wasn’t pleased with McLaren’s performance at the 2022 Bahrain Grand Prix. The team struggled with overheating issues and ran mostly at the back of the grid for the entirety of the race.

Norris’ response to being asked about his race was that of self-loathing. Speaking at a post-race media session, he said:

“Amazing race really. Really enjoyed it.”

The sarcastic reply seemed to project his mood following an extremely difficult weekend for McLaren. Speaking more about his experience throughout the race, Norris said:

“It was just tough to hang on to the car to like, be especially when you’re against quicker cars, you want to try to keep up. That’s your only hope. And when you do so it’s easy to make mistakes. You just take out way too much from the tires and just trying to be over-optimistic with a position.”

McLaren started their pre-season well at Barcelona and seemed to have a solid car that didn’t experience proposing as much as their rivals. Issues started cropping up, however, in the second test in Bahrain, with the MCL36 struggling with brake overheating issues.

The team’s fix for that issue seems to have hampered the car’s performance potential. Heading into Bahrain, McLaren were expecting a tough weekend but seemed shocked by their abysmal performance in qualifying when Norris and Daniel Ricciardo could only manage P13 and P18 respectively.

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McLaren “starting afresh” in trying to understand the MCL36: Lando Norris

Lando Norris says McLaren are starting “afresh” in trying to better understand their 2022 challenger, hoping to come up with better fixes for their issues ahead of the Saudi Arabian GP this weekend. Speaking during a post-race media session, he said:

“We have a lot of work to do quite simply between us here on the track, but also everyone back at MTC, where we work as hard as possible for next week to try and bring some improvements and figure out the car a little bit more to see if there’s anything we’re missing, or we’ve got away from. Just kind of tried to start fresh, but as well learn as many things as we can from this weekend.”

Ahead of the 2022 season, McLaren was one of the pre-season favorites, with many hoping that their superstar driver line-up of Daniel Ricciardo and Lando Norris might finally get a car deserving of their impressive talents.

The team, however, quickly went from a position of strength in Barcelona, where they looked equally as impressive as Ferrari, to a position of weakness in Bahrain where their struggles were similar to that of Williams.

The Woking-based squad currently seems unable to understand the root cause of their issues, with their interim fixes costing them huge amounts of lap time.