How McLaren’s eye-catching start stalled at the Bahrain test

The track has just gone silent, marker boards suddenly flashing bright red. A car has stopped in the Bahrain pitlane exit, halfway to the turn-in point for the first corner. Its driver stands alone by the side of the stranded machine. Marshals are massing on the narrow infield grass in front of the gigantic BIC tower overlooking the scene.

But a handily placed car recovery crane isn’t moving. The driver eventually turns his back towards his car and bows down. He places his hands onto the halo and cockpit edge and strains. The wheels slowly start churning and they’re off, heading back down the long slog to the Sakhir pitlane entrance on a day that has earlier reached 39C. Now, as the sun disappears before the final hours of running on day two of the final 2022 Formula 1 pre-season test, it has cooled, but not by much.

It had all been looking so good for McLaren. The team had left the three days of running at Barcelona buoyed by the MCL36’s compliant and predictable handling and overall pace. The most visible problem it had was the car’s new livery appearing much more washed out and cluttered when running in real track conditions rather than sitting in a studio. McLaren made tweaks for a filming day in Bahrain ahead of the test, adding significant black decals that made the car appear meaner, cooler, and – really – classier. But the Bahrain test got off to a bad start and got much worse.

Daniel Ricciardo had been set to drive on the opening morning of the event but was said to be feeling too unwell. Rumours abounded regarding the Australian suffering possible COVID-19 symptoms – inflated by his absence alongside Lando Norris in F1’s now regular promotional photo and film shoot on the Bahrain pitstraight before the first day of testing began – but he was said to be returning negative results. As Kings of Leon reached the halfway point of their set in the Al Dana Amphitheatre positioned just behind the circuit’s Turn 4 last Friday night, McLaren announced that Ricciardo had now tested positive and was self-isolating. Norris, who had taken his team-mate’s place on the opening morning and continued through the rest of the first two days, saw out the test solo.

Lando Norris ended up the sole McLaren driver at the Bahrain test with Daniel Ricciardo ruled out with COVID-19

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Ordinarily that would have been a massive boost for Norris’s 2022 chances. Twelve years ago, the 2010 F1 season was about to commence after 15 days of pre-season running. But in this era, running is so limited on cost grounds that most of the current crop of racers are heading into this weekend’s season opener having completed just three full days across the entire pre-season. Norris’s total is raised to 4.5 days, and he topped the individual lap count for the Bahrain test at 200. But both stats are misleading.

On the first day, Norris only completed 50 laps and spent huge swathes of the day out of the car. The problem concerned the MCL36’s front brake ducts, which were understood to be just too small to cope with the cooling demands for the major stops at the Sakhir track, as well as work in conditions that were much hotter than at Barcelona.

"We are behind from where we want to be and need to be. It’s not great, but we got through as much as we could. We are definitely making progress, but it’s not the position we want to be in" Lando Norris

“It’s not going to be an easy fix, so we’ll see what we can do,” Norris said at the end of the first day, when only Pietro Fittipaldi, who missed the opening four hours of running due to Haas’s late-arriving freight, notched up fewer laps (47 for the American squad’s test driver).

McLaren was able to engineer a temporary fix for the problem, but with so little time available even this meant that Norris’s longest run of the second day was just eight laps (one short of his lengthiest first-day run). In fact, over all three days in Bahrain, his biggest stint reached just 19 laps and the next highest was 12.

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Team principal Andreas Seidl revealed that McLaren was in a “race against time” to get the parts from the permanent solution its Woking factory had been working on over to Bahrain in time for the third day. But with Norris’s lap count then only reaching 90 (Alfa Romeo led the way on 150 and lost the last half hour to a transmission issue stopping Valtteri Bottas on track), the team must wait until this weekend’s grand prix before what Seidl calls its “real” fix is in place and it can see where it truly stacks up in 2022’s long-run pecking order.

McLaren's running at the Bahrain test was heavily restricted by a front brake duct issue

Photo by: Motorsport Images

The test wasn’t all lost for McLaren, since it deployed Norris to run regular aerodynamic assessments, even if the brake problem prevented him from tackling race simulations and the qualifying-style efforts most other squads put in during the final evening session (although Norris said McLaren did get some “lower-fuel” running in elsewhere). The stoppage near the end of the second day, when Norris decided to push his car back to the pits – he was later joined by several marshals and eventually his mechanics when they reached the pitlane – was oddly reminiscent of a similar incident in Spain that McLaren put down to new car ‘teething’.

“Less than ideal,” Norris said of McLaren’s last testing preparations during the final-day press conference, which he had to leave early because he was the only driver required to head out again that afternoon. “We are behind from where we want to be and need to be. It’s not great, but we got through as much as we could. We are definitely making progress, but it’s not the position we want to be in.”

Despite the challenges of the truncated running, he explained that when it came to McLaren’s intention to improve its new package, in “certain areas” it had succeeded, while in others it had not. “Where we were strong is high-speed corners in Barcelona,” he explained. “Similar to the last few years – we’ve always been very strong in high-speed corners, sometimes one of the most competitive. But low-speed corners are where we struggle, and I think at the moment things are very similar here.

“Even looking at Mercedes, Red Bull, Ferrari – they’re quite a long way ahead of us in those types of corners. That’s why in general we looked stronger in Barcelona than we have done here. It’s difficult, because there are always things to improve on, and things you maybe don’t show and so on.

“But I think we’re still in a decent place. It’s just you never know when people are showing their pace and when they’re not, so it’s difficult to work it out. We have a lot of work to do. We’re definitely not in as good a place as we were in Barcelona.”

Despite its struggles, McLaren remain optimistic given its strong showing fresh out of the box at the Barcelona test

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

With the brake solution on its way and Ricciardo set to return for this weekend’s action – he was already said to be feeling better even on the day he tested positive – McLaren will need to hit the ground running. There are only the three one-hour practice sessions before qualifying, but the team can still glean data on its long-run performance ahead of Sunday’s race – it will just have to crunch it at the same time as fettling set-ups.

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McLaren team members insist that the MCL36 is a pretty potent package and, once it can run to its full potential, things may well not be as bad as they appeared last week. Plus, as Norris, suggests, its Bahrain form may be track specific. But the major positive for McLaren is that it appears not to have the porpoising problem that is still occurring at the other squads. Its car is running slickly and even better than Red Bull in this regard on the straights – and can run lower to the ground as a result.

The combination of McLaren’s Bahrain test headaches following its Barcelona potential, with the lack of porpoising thrown in, leaves the team standing as seemingly the biggest unknown quantity coming into the season opener

This is why Norris feels that attacking kerbs is “different” for McLaren compared to rival teams running higher rides, because at this stage those others are able to more confidently run over kerbs in a similar way to previous seasons, and McLaren seemingly cannot for fear of causing damage to the critical ground-effect floor parts.

The combination of McLaren’s Bahrain test headaches following its Barcelona potential, with the lack of porpoising thrown in, leaves the team standing as seemingly the biggest unknown quantity coming into the season opener. Seidl suggests that Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes are ahead, but there is still a quiet confidence coming from McLaren, which after all was keen to play down expectations in the pre-season given that its investment in new design facilities at its factory are yet to be completed and therefore pay off.

With form likely to fluctuate between the teams at different track types this season, opportunistic and self-assured squads will surely thrive. For all that it must wish 2022’s pre-season had ended on a brighter note, McLaren heads into the new campaign knowing it remains the slick operation that built up to and seized a famous victory at Monza last year. Perhaps there will still yet be further distinctions to follow.

McLaren's showing in Bahrain makes it one of the trickier teams to nail down in the predicted pecking order

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images