Racing
© Lukas Raich
Lando Norris said McLaren’s fourth place in the British Grand Prix masked a car that was badly off the pace at Silverstone, with the Briton calling for the team to improve “many things” and bring meaningful upgrades to recover performance.
Norris finished fourth at his home race and third in the Sprint, but he made clear the result was better than the underlying performance. “Everything but the result was pretty shocking,” Norris said after the race. “I don't know how we finished P4 today, honestly.” He said McLaren lacked pace throughout the weekend compared with Mercedes and Ferrari.
The most worrying part for Norris was how difficult the car had become to drive. He said it was “not a nice car to drive” and “one of the hardest cars I've ever driven in Formula 1,” adding that there were “many things we need to be better at.” He also described the car as “undrivable” after a weekend that felt well below McLaren’s usual standard.
Norris said the finish owed more to staying out of trouble than to outright speed. “A big part of it nowadays is reliability. I don't know what happened to Kimi and Max,” he said. “A big part of it is just not making mistakes and reliability. We got that bit right today, but the pace was pretty poor.”
That left Norris pointing to a deeper development problem. He said McLaren has not brought a major track upgrade since the Miami Grand Prix, where he finished second, and that the smaller updates since then have not added much performance. “We've been slow all year, but it's not this slow,” he said. “There's no way we can finish P2 in Miami, and form a car like this. Other people have bought a lot of upgrades and updates since, and we kind of haven't, nothing that has brought us that much performance.”
Norris said McLaren now needs to understand several issues quickly, including a poor start that he could not explain, before Formula 1 heads to Spa. “Our pace to achieve these results was really very bad,” he said. “We need to take a big step.”