It was a season-opening race to forget for McLaren, with the Woking-based side clearly having a mountain to climb, after Lando Norris was forced to pit six times during the Bahrain Grand Prix.
The 23-year-old made a strong start to the race before a pneumatic problem was discovered by the team, which resulted in him pitting every 10 laps so that the car could continue running.
To no surprise, Norris finished last out of the drivers who didn’t retire, which included his rookie team-mate Oscar Piastri.
Piastri retired early on following an electrical issue, bringing a miserable debut to an end for the talented Australian.
READ: Lewis Hamilton fires Mercedes warning
When Norris was on-track, his pace was actually good enough for a points finish, suggesting that a lot more is yet to come from the British team.
Despite the disappointment of not being able to run a normal race, Norris was in good form after the race, where he joked that the “biggest positive” of the race was all the practice his pit crew got.
“I think the best thing is the mechanics did a lot of pit stop practices. That’s the biggest positive,” Norris joked.
“Good start, good launch, made up a few positions and then we had problems from turn one basically – pneumatic problems and various other issues. That just brought out us of the race more and more, we had to pit every ten laps and that was it.
“I don’t know enough to be honest, better to ask Andrea [Stella]. I don’t know what it was affecting, gearbox, engine. I have no idea. On the second pit stop he said I had to come back in, he said every 10 laps.
READ: Red Bull deny changing ride height after concerning Bahrain pace
McLaren CEO Zak Brown confirmed after the race why Piastri was forced to retire and why Norris was forced to pit so many times, with the American having admitted that it was certainly a “challenging start to the year”.
“Looks like he has some sort of electrical issue. He had a gearbox-related issue on track which I think was electronic,” Brown told Sky Sports F1.
“We changed steering wheels but that doesn’t seem to have done the trick. We’ll have to diagnose what it is, but it appears to be electrical. And Lando has pneumatic issues. We’re monitoring that, but we might have to do that again. So a challenging start to the year.”