The orange team currently sits third in the 2024 constructors’ standings – 55 points better and two places higher than at the same stage a year ago – and leads the Mercedes and Aston Martin teams in the tight battle behind the dominant team Red Bull and Ferrari. .
Although a major improvement year-on-year, Ferrari has established itself as Red Bull’s closest challenger so far this season, a position McLaren has taken great advantage of in the break-in period for the 2023 season.
Ferrari’s off-season development work has even helped it overhaul McLaren’s advantages in late 2023 at high-speed tracks such as Suzuka, where two weeks ago the Scuderia recovered from qualifying its drivers behind Norris to beat him to the last place on the podium adrift of Max Verstappen and Sergio Pérez.
After Suzuka, McLaren team principal Andrea Stella told the F1 Nation podcast that he still believes his team can “think about winning races this year” if they can replicate their impressive development during the 2023 season.
Asked about Stella’s comments at the pre-event press conference when the Chinese Grand Prix returned this weekend, Norris initially joked that he thought such an improvement for McLaren to win victories in 2024 was not possible in the short term.
“Not anytime soon, that’s for sure!” he joked.
But then he added how he felt: “I think we can [win with the] in the right place, at the right time – if we improve the car, we need it too.
“Honestly, there haven’t been a lot of frustrations with Suzuka,” he continued.
“Everything went pretty much as planned. I don’t think we did a perfect job and we probably should have finished one place higher, potentially.
“But I don’t think it’s far away. We’ve been in the same place all season – behind Red Bull, behind Ferrari and we were a bit ahead of the other two teams in the race.
“And that’s exactly how last weekend happened. So I don’t think there was too much frustration.
“But we know the problems, we know what we need to improve and if we can improve them, I think Andrea is right: we can win races this year and we can be competitive with these other two teams in front of us.
“But it’s an ‘if’ and you have to work hard to improve the car in some of these areas, which have been a big challenge for us over the last few years, not just the last few years.”
“But if we can do that, I’m confident we can have some good races.”
McLaren is set to make its first major upgrade for 2024 to the MCL38 at the upcoming F1 round in Miami, with potentially two more big development projects to follow later in the season.
