Lando Norris not satisfied with F1 progress amid 'pretty terrible' McLaren issue
Lando Norris is pleased with the progress his McLaren team has made – but wants more from his car before he is satisfied with its overall performance.
Max Verstappen won the British Grand Prix last weekend but Norris was the star of the show at Silverstone. The biggest roar of qualifying came from the grandstands when, briefly, he was on provisional pole before the Dutchman snatched it away.
The crowd was rocking again at the start of the race when Norris took the lead off the line. He held it for only five laps with the Red Bull too quick to resist, but it was clear the McLarens were the second quickest cars on the day.
Even after a safety car restart, when Norris and Oscar Piastri were on hard tyres, Lewis Hamilton and George Russell could not catch the papaya cars they had in front of them. Norris finished second, while his rookie team-mate was unlucky only to come fourth behind Hamilton.
Norris was the toast of Silverstone and could not stop beaming after the race. But despite equalling his career-best Formula 1 result in front of his home crowd, the Brit was still thinking about further improvements he wants from his car.
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Speaking to reporters, including Mirror Sport, in the post-race press conference, Norris said: "These tracks allow us to look after the tyres well. We're very, very competitive in high speed – we're almost on par with what Red Bull could achieve and, actually, I would say towards the medium speed like Turn 15 here, Stowe, I would say we're close to being the best car on the grid.
"Super, super high speed like Turn 9 [Copse], maybe not quite so much, but that was in qualifying and then when we come to the race we definitely maintain our performance when others seem to take a bit of a hit.
Norris' words came minutes after sharing the Silverstone podium with Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton (PA)"And in doing so we can actually look after the tyres pretty well, especially when there's no thermal limitation within tyre like there was necessarily today. But we do have a poor car – and I say poor, I would say pretty terrible in the slow-speed corners, extremely difficult to drive.
"I feel we're getting excited and I accept that, but we're going to go to a couple of tracks coming up where I'm sure people are going to be saying, 'What have you done now? Like, how has it got so bad all of a sudden?'
"So, we've improved a lot of things – tyre degradation – there's always little things you try and do with tyre cooling and blah, blah, blah, but nothing big from that side. It's just this track has allowed us to look after the tyres nicely, keep them in a good condition. Simple as that.
"So a lot of it is track-specific. I don't want to get too excited, but good things have come from the upgrade but there's still plenty of things which are miles away from, say, competing in certain places with a Mercedes and as a whole package competing even with a Red Bull. So, a lot more work to be done from both of those areas."
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