F1 | Norris comments on McLaren’s brake problems in Bahrain testing: “Not an easy fix”
McLaren faces brake problems and Ricciardo's feeling unwell on the first day of Bahrain testing after Barcelona’s experience completely trouble-free.
After three perfect days in Spain, McLaren has its first difficult day in Bahrain with a problem with the brakes, which is not – as Norris himself described it – “an easy fix”. Moreover, Ricciardo is facing a health problem, so the Briton had to step in right away.
“As a whole, not the day we really wanted, - Norris commented – Daniel is not feeling so well so I decided to jump in, [it was] much easier to do it that way. But we had quite a few issues today with the car, we took a long time to figure it out and that limited us quite a bit to do the amount of laps we wanted to do.”
Norris then explained how it felt to drive an uncertain MCL36.
“It’s a bit frustrating, because especially here, being so different to Barcelona, we really wanted to try and understand as much as we could in the differences and how the car’s working here, on a much bumpier track, more difficult track… which I think we still did to a certain extent, we just couldn’t do any of the longer running.”
Nevertheless, he could complete a clean run in the afternoon, facing well Turn 1 and Turn 10. Yet, he felt it could have gone better.
“We made the most of it, but definitely some issues which held us back. We just had problems with the brakes today,- he pointed out – Simple as that.”
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“The exact problems I’m not too sure, but it’s just temperatures and stuff, it just didn’t allow us to do long runs, - he said. – Things we’re trying to fix for the next few days, it’s not going to be an easy fix. We’ll see what we can do. Everyone’s working hard to come up with something.”
At this point, it is important to understand if this can problem affect the rest of the testing days for the Woking-based team.
“I hope not. We hope to figure out things tonight, over tonight and into tomorrow and so on. – he said hopefully, - But it was not just something we could just fix today, it’s not something that easy to fix. We’ll come up with compromises and things here and there to allow us to do more running for sure, the guys are already working on that.”
The last question mark is whether is Ricciardo going to run on Friday or not, and the Briton points out that it is to be defined yet.
“Of course we want him to get better, - said Norris, - he’s still not feeling well, but he’s resting, he’s sleeping, and we’ll see if he’s better tomorrow.”
