McLaren and Lando Norris send a warning to the rest of the F1 field

Formula 1 pre-season testing is in the rear-view mirror and all ten teams are hard at work diving into the data, with less than two weeks until the lap times count at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix. For the second season in a row, Carlos Sainz Jr. topped the timing sheets, putting his Williams FW47 at the front of the field after doing the same for Ferrari in the SF-24 a season ago.

However, one of the data points many are looking at comes from the second day of testing, and it is not the time Sainz posted for Williams. Instead, it is the three race simulations Lando Norris did in the MCL39, and they might have the rest of the field a little worried at the moment.

Norris’ best lap in Bahrain — a time of 1:30.430 — was good for just 13th in the field over the three days of testing. However, the consistency Norris and the MCL39 showed over those three longer runs on Thursday, particularly when compared to race simulations from other teams, is not to be ignored.

Even with the usual caveats about taking testing times with a grain of salt.

Norris put together three extended runs, first an 18-lap effort, followed by a 16-lap stint and another 18-lap stint, for a total of 52 laps over the three long runs.

For reference, the Bahrain Grand Prix itself is 57 laps.

Here, courtesy of Fast F1, are the lap times over those laps:

On the first stint, Norris’ fastest lap was a 1:35.099, which he posted on Lap 23 overall, the 12th lap of that run. His slowest time was a 1:36.372.

Those laps came on the C3 compound.

Then came the second stint, which saw McLaren bolt on a set of the C1 tires to his MCL39. The fastest lap during that 16-lap run was a 1:34.071, with the slowest lap coming on the first of the stint, a 1:35.010. Other than that initial lap, each following run around the Bahrain International Circuit came in the 1:34 range.

Then the final stint, with a set of the C2 tires bolted on. This was the fastest of the three race simulations, with Norris’ fastest lap clocking in at 1:32.267. He had one slow lap on Lap 57, something of an outlier at 1:34.196, but most were in the 1:32 or 1:33 range.

Here, courtesy of F1 Tempo, is Norris’ Tuesday in Bahrain in graphic form:

Standing alone these lap times might not mean much, but when you compare his race simulations to what other drivers did in Bahrain, a picture starts to form. Take this graphic, also from F1 Tempo, comparing his race simulations to those of Charles Leclerc and Andrea Kimi Antonelli. First, a comparison to Ferrari and Leclerc:

As you can see, Leclerc had some longer runs of his own, but Norris was consistently faster over those long stints.

The same goes for Antonelli who, despite being a rookie was impressive in his own right in his first F1 pre-season testing session:

As Andrew Benson wrote at BBC Sport if you extrapolate these simulations to a race, “[Norris] would have won the ‘race’ by more than 30 second, and was on average more than 0.5 seconds a lap quicker than his rivals.”

For those wondering about an F1 Drivers’ Championship fight between Norris and Max Verstappen, the defending Drivers’ Champion ran some medium-length stints on Friday with his times in the 1:34/1:35 range, comparable to Norris’ first Thursday stint:

Again, it is much too early to draw definitive conclusions about the state of the field, and testing times are to be taken with some skepticism. Still, the pace McLaren and Norris showed in Bahrain was the talk of the paddock. “Norris is the outlier,” Sky Sports F1’s Karun Chandhok said on Thursday. “It’s extraordinarily fast on his final stint.”

McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella downplayed matters, saying he would be “careful” about reading too much into the data from Norris’ runs. He also pointed to the cool conditions on Thursday, saying “they were conditions our car enjoys, cool, not much wind.”

But as the teams, and the media, dive into the data, Norris’ runs on Thursday certainly stand out.

Will something similar happens when the lap times count for real?