Mclaren struggles with front brakes
After a strong run at the Circuit de Barcelona-catalunya, Mclaren endured a much more difficult second batch of running in Bahrain.
Overheating issues with the brakes severely limited the long running that Lando Norris – on sole test duties owing to Daniel Ricciardo’s positive COVID-19 test – could do as Mclaren sought to find a fix.
With the change to the front wheels, Mclaren has found it difficult to get the right level of airflow into the wheel assembly and provide adequate cooling within. And across a full race distance, it will decrease the effectiveness of braking at the front and severely hamper their lifespan. Mclaren has to fix that for the opening round of the season.
“The test definitely didn’t go to plan,” Andreas Seidl told 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.
“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 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 [on Saturday] to a certain degree, but not to the full extent. And now simply hope that with the upgrades we get for [the Bahrain GP] that the problem is finally solved, and we can try to come back.”