McLaren completed the fewest amount of laps of any team in Bahrain as a recurring front brak✱e issue reduced it to🔯 just 200 laps across the three days of running.

Besides its difficulties with the brakes, McLaren was without Daniel Ricciardo after he was ruled out of the first two day♔s through illness before testing positive for COVID-19.

It was in stark contrast to the first test where McLaren left Barcelona as one of the teams to ꦚbeat alongside Ferrari.

Reflecting on the second testও in Bahrain, Norris conceded that the issues have been “less than ideal”.

“Less than ideal, it’s not been the smoothest of tests for us,” Norris said. “It’s been quite lim﷽ited in Bahrain. I think Barceꦫlona was a good one but here we’ve encountered quite a few more problems, which have limited the amount of laps we’ve done by quite a huge amount.

“We’re behind where we wan🃏t to be, where we need to be, and where we can say we’re confident in any way going into the first race. It's no🌼t great but we’re getting through as much as we can. We’re definitely making progress, but definitely not in the position we want to be in.”

McLaren team principal Andreas Seidl h𓄧as said it was in a “race against time” to bring upgraded parts ahead of the season-opener in ༺Bahrain.

With new parts on the w🦩ay, Norris says McLaren won’t know if the issue is completely fixed until the car takes to the track again this weekend.

“I think we are on top of it,” he added. “We know what the problems are, we know what we are suffering with, and so on. Coming up with the perfect fix is always the question of: ‘do we have that or ജnot?’

“That’s what we’re unsure about until we get to next week and we put it all together🍌. The team are working hard to understand the problems, obviously why they happened in the first place and why we encounter them, and theඣn work on the fix for next week.

“But it’s not a simple fix; it’s quite a complicated area, it takes a lot of work, a lot of time to come up with these parts and so on and that’s why it’s the challenge to get it all🅰 here and in a good condition for next week.”