Seidl: McLaren “on the back foot” after brake cooling dramas

In the high temperatures at Sakhir the team discovered that it had insufficient cooling to its front brakes, which restricted any long runs.

New parts were flown in for Saturday, which improved the situation. However, they were only a temporary fix, and the team is working towards a definitive solution for next weekend’s Bahrain Grand Prix.

With Daniel Ricciardo sidelined by COVID-19, Lando Norris had the MCL36 to himself, and over the three days the Englishman completed 50, 60 and 90 laps.

That left the team with a much lower overall total than it had planned, and thus a lot of routine work was not completed.

"The test definitely didn't go to plan,” Seidl said in an interview with F1 TV. “We had an unexpected problem on the front axle with the brakes, which limited our running quite a bit. Especially when it came to long runs.

“So it puts us definitely a bit on the back foot. Still, I think there was still a lot of positive runs we could do as well, we still could work on the car to extract more performance from it. We still could bring further upgrades to the car as well. So that was positive.

“But definitely we have this issue. And we simply are up against the time in order to bring upgrades to the car to solve the issue, which we could do to a certain degree, but not to the full extent.

“And now simply hope that with the upgrades we get for next week that the problem is finally solved, and we can try to come back."

Seidl conceded that the new parts didn’t completely solve the problem.

"We made steps,” he said. “But due to the time constraints we have we could only do limited changes, also with the great support we had from home.

“So it allowed us to actually to do some longer runs again, today in the morning, trying