Lando Norris, McLaren Formula 1 driver, slipped from second place to seventh in the Dutch Grand Prix. He feels dishearten at the race pace, which he believes is still “nowhere near enough”.
The Brit acknowledged the role of strategy especially to stay out on slicks unlike Alonso. Despite the strategy failure, he asserted that MCL60 lacked competitiveness on Sunday. He claims that car was more competitive during qualifying. He felt “terrible” compared to its rivals Mercedes and Aston Martin.
“There are times when it’s down to pace and times when it’s down to strategy, and the strategy is what messed us up,” he said.
“I don’t think the pace is bad, the pace was okay. Not good enough, if you want to say what was our pace compared to Aston’s? It was pretty terrible. Compared to Mercedes? Pretty terrible.
“So our pace was a long way off the pace that we showed in qualifying. And our one-lap is still a lot more competitive than our race pace.
“I think that’s becoming more and more evident. And we’re doing whatever we can to fix it and make steps forward. But at the minute it’s nowhere near enough.”
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Norris insisted that McLaren lost the strategy for not putting him on intermediate tyres. He believes the decision cost them points as many teams went for tyre change at first and second lap. The Brit pitted on third lap which pushed him as low as 12th on the grid.
“I think it’s clear we made the wrong decision. And we made a bad decision,” he said.
“It’s something we’ll review and talk about and discuss. Because I guess we’ve made a couple this season. We’ve lost too many positions and lots a lot of points throughout this year with a couple of these things.
“The second part of the race we made up for it, well not made up for it. But we made the right decision and were one of the first ones to box [when the rain returned], and we gained some time, we gained a position on George [Russell] and things like that. But the first one was just, not great.”
