Norris: McLaren want to ‘start fresh’ after ‘suffering’ in Bahrain

Lando Norris said McLaren were “a little bit” surprised at their lack of pace, but acknowledged he knew it was going to be “a long weekend”.

Both Norris and Daniel Ricciardo qualified outside the top 10 on Saturday, and they never looked like threatening the points-paying positions as they took P14 and P15 in Bahrain on Sunday.

Norris admitted the MCL36 isn’t currently up to scratch when it comes to fighting with teams around them, but added that the team are working hard to try and sort out their issues – and “start fresh”.

“It was just tough to hang onto the car,” Norris admitted to Formula1.com. “Especially when you’re around quicker cars, you want to try and keep up because that’s your only hope and, when you do so, it’s easy to make mistakes.

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“You just deg[rade] the tyres way too much comparing to what you should by trying to be too over-optimistic with a position.

“Not in a bad way – it’s just you’re pushing to try and do better, and we just don’t really have a good enough car at the minute to do better.

“So we have a lot of work to do, quite simply, between us here at the track but also everyone back at MTC [McLaren Technology Centre], where we’re working as hard as possible for next week to try and bring some improvements and figure out the car a little bit more.

“See