With Oscar Piastri having won four of the first six races of the season and established a lead in the World Championship his McLaren Formula 1 team mate Lando Norris has to strike back as soon as he can if he is to retain his title hopes.
We are already 25% into the season, and with a busy European triple header beginning in Imola – a track where the Briton has a solid record of doing well – a lot of points are up for grabs over the next three weekends.
Piastri clearly has momentum on his side, and a good run over this sequences of races will be a further boost.
Norris has made it clear in recent months that he’s not felt fully comfortable with this year’s MCL39, and is not getting the feedback he needs to feel the limit of the grip available.
He’s been working away with the team in an attempt to improve the situation, and Imola will be another test of whether or not he is finding the answers.
“I go to the factory every week, so it’s a constant thing,” he said on Thursday when I asked if he had made progress on that front since Miami. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, there’s new issues, let’s dig into them.’
“We’re always trying to improve things. I’m trying to improve my own things, whether that’s the track or away from it. And the team are doing a great good job to try and help me understand things and figure out things and give me the things that I need to get more out of the car.
“So now there’s been a lot of a lot of work behind the scenes, as there always is. But more than more than ever, I would say, which is a positive thing.”
It’s easy to be sceptical when F1 drivers talk about a car not suiting their style, especially when their team mate seems to be perfectly attuned to the same machine.
However we’re talking about fine margins when these guys are operating at the absolute limit, especially when poles and race wins are at stake.
“Every driver has different ways of driving cars,” said Norris. “In the end of the day, I have no excuses, because I also feel like it’s my job to drive whatever car I get driven.
“So I’m not going to have excuses, but I’m going to have reasons at times, but in the end of the day, I just want to drive the best I can. So I might have days I struggle. I might have days I perform better.
“But no driver is ever satisfied. I’m still trying to improve myself, but we’re still trying to improve the car even though we’re winning races, we’re second in races, we’re dominating races, we still come away at times not happy and expecting more and wanting more.
“So yeah, this is one of the things that’s made my life trickier this year than it was last season, and it’s not allowing me to get my full potential. But I need more from the car, and I also know that I need to – at times – do a better job too.”
The challenge Norris faces is obviously firstly to fully understand what’s not working for him, and secondly to find solutions. It’s not easy to turn things around.
“I don’t always have to have reasons straight away,” he noted. “Sometimes it takes time, just like some of the difficulties I’ve had with the car this year, I know that some of the things that we’re trying to work on to improve my feeling takes time, and I have to be patient with certain things, and I have to be patient with my own improvements at times.
“You always want to go into the next weekend and things to be perfect. But it’s not always the case. You look at any other sports, no team just goes from one day to the next day and becomes a loser and then a winner.
“Sometimes it takes two or three races, whether it’s a football team or tennis player, a golfer, you never see them going from a shocking weekend to just dominating all of a sudden, especially when you’re at the top.
“Sometimes it takes weeks, months, different amount of races. So I don’t always need to have the reasons, but it’s always better to find them out so you can work on them.”
On the plus side Norris knows he has a car that can win races when everything falls into place.
Why the MCL39 is so good at managing its tyres is the question that is vexing the opposition.
“A lot of people talk about the tyres a lot, all the time, but it’s not just the tyres,” he said. “There’s a lot of different things that we do well, including just the balance and how the car performs. So all we have to do is keep focusing on our own job.
“We’ve not really had any upgrades or many big improvements when other teams have. So we’re taking our time with stuff, and making sure we do it our way. And I’m happy with that.”
Adam Cooper F1 