An awful lot has been made of the steps forward McLaren made in 2023. To go from near the back of the grid to regularly achieving podiums is a remarkable feat, but was achieved by the team fixing some obvious issues with the car. Developing the MCL38 for 2024 was never going to be as straightforward a step although they did look strong in testing.
While they weren’t on the same level as Red Bull, that was always going to be a stretch considering their domination last year. However, Palmer believes he’s spotted an Achilles heel in McLaren’s new car that may affect Oscar Piastri in particular.
Speaking about Zak Brown and Andrea Stella’s team, Palmer said: “I’m going to stick [McLaren] in third, they started the test really well, Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri racking up some mileage on day one and the car looked very quick straight out of the box.
“They weren’t too aggressive with their tyre choice, they didn’t have any softer compounds of tyre to throw on.
“They were very methodical, running through their test program rigorously, waiting while others got the early mileage in, then they went out and again the car hit the track and looked very nice straight away.
“Remember this is a team that had such a big development curve last year, obviously they’re in a better place than they were last year because that was pretty bad.
“What they want to do is get to a position where either their so far Grand Prix winless drivers can take one this year, I think they might do that.
“But what concerns me is that race running. Oscar Piastri got in the car this afternoon and didn’t do the most complete race run, had quite a lot of degradation which was his Achilles heel.
“He showed so much one lap pace but the race running wasn’t great. That looked the same and the problem was, Lando Norris didn’t do a race simulation run.
“A bit of reliability concerns for McLaren meant he only did 20 laps today and didn’t get a race run yesterday afternoon either, so that’s a question mark for me at McLaren.”
