Andrea Stella, McLaren Formula 1 boss, believes that Lando Norris did his best to win Spanish Grand Prix. The British driver felt frustrated after losing to Max Verstappen. However, the team believes that he did his best to win the top position.
Norris felt disappointed for losing his pole position to George Russell and Max Verstappen, which led to 2nd place on podium. He appeared to have the fastest car on track, which did not yield in high gains during the race.
At the start of the race, Norris lost position to both Russell and Verstappen. He got stuck behind Russell, while the Dutch driver increased the gap. He believes this caused his demise from crown because he lost critical time behind Russell.
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However, McLaren thinks he did best and its not his fault. Stella claims that he had no control over Russell take over at the first corner.
“I think actually Lando’s start wasn’t very bad at all,” explained Stella. “It was a decent start, like he was almost one car ahead of Max.
“But the fact is that Russell got the double slipstream of Lando and Max. And, in corner one, I think Lando was just very wise, because it’s one second and your race is gone. And that’s not the way we want to race. We want to stay in the race.
“So I think from an opportunity point of view it [the start] was more of a detail. Okay, you can do an even better start, you would have been one metre ahead, but it’s very, very marginal.”
Stella thinks that small things can have major implications like Turn 1 event. He claims that high-drag enabled Russell with an opportunity to run-over for the lead.
“You have no margin in which you can compensate any little imprecision,” said Stella. “I would say that the main factor was that we couldn’t defend the first position in Barcelona.
“This is not necessarily a surprise, because you have such a long run to corner one. Plus the cars run high downforce, that as soon as you gain a bit of slipstream, it makes you so much faster than the car ahead. This meant that Lando was not in condition to defend his pole position.
“I actually appreciated his wise approach to stay out of trouble there, because the race we know was going to come to us. It was just the couple of positions lost at corner one and the time lost behind Russell. They were the two decisive factors.
“And the [slow final] pit stop, probably another one second. But in fairness, even with the one second, if we had been behind Verstappen at the start [and in front of Russell], I think we could have played our cards with good chances.”
