Lewis Hamilton and Lando Norris were happy with their battle in F1 British GP as they praise each other.
For McLaren, it was their best weekend in F1 for a long time, probably since Monza 2021 when Daniel Ricciardo took the win. They were second and third in qualifying, where Norris from the front row led the opening laps before being overtaken by Red Bull’s Max Verstappen.
After the short fight against Verstappen early on, the battle was between Norris and Mercedes’ Hamilton. It was one of Norris’ most mature drives ever and a humdinger of a battle. At some stages they were side by side entering Copse after safety car re-start when the Mercedes tried chasing the McLaren driver for second.
“It was a very good one,” said Norris. “It was exciting. I really did want to hold on to P2, so I did everything I could and a lot of it was trying to get the temperature in the tyres for the restart”. But luckily as he said the first half a lap they were very strong, even in Qualifying they were up on us all the way until Maggotts, Becketts section.
“We were just very good always in the last sector. Not the best, maybe with DRS. That’s where Red Bull are extremely quick, but they’re very good in the first half so Turn 3, Turn 4, Turns 6 and 7, Lewis could quite easily get on me. But then we’ve always been very good in high speed and now it’s a very good strength of ours, it keeps the tyres in a good condition and I was a lot of laps quite easily flat through Turn 9 and yeah, two downshifts into Maggotts and Becketts and I could always give myself that safety margin that I wanted but it was nice coming out side-by-side”.
“It was close, when I saw him I throw it up the inside in Turn 7. And yeah, I’m sure the fans were loving it at the same time but I chose a slightly lower downforce level which was a bit of a risk but I thought there might be a racing situation where one or two kph might have helped me out and today I did exactly that. So I’m thanking my own decision to choose a lower downforce,” summed up Norris.
The words of the Brit was concurred by Hamilton as he praised the McLaren driver for his drive. “I threw it up the insight into Turn 7 in the hope that I can finally… this is the moment that I’m going to make it happen and I pressed the overtake button, so we’re both going down the road with the overtake but he had less drag so I guess he said they had a smaller wing and they just started pulling so I had to back out,” he said.
“But I was relatively quick in the first half of the lap and I think if you look at our qualifying laps, we were very, very close to Max all the way until… I think it’s until Turn 13 and then that’s where they pull all their time. So we’ve got some work to do to improve our high speed performance”.
“He is very talented, naturally, as you can see and I think is great when you can have close battles like that and rely on the driver that you’re competing with to be fair and hard but fair and so there was never an element or a moment where we thought we were going to come together or anything like that”.
“And then that’s what motor racing is all about. As he wanted to hold onto second, I wanted to get that second but it wasn’t meant to be. So we just get our heads down and keep pushing and hopefully we’ll have some more battles moving forward,” summed up Hamilton. The strategy somewhat didn’t work for Mercedes even though they were on a slightly favourable one.
After Hamilton pitted for softs, team boss Toto Wolff was convinced that the Mercedes would get past the McLaren with ease as Norris was on the hard compound but it didn’t happen. “I mean, just knowing what it’s like to be on the Hards on the restart at the end with someone on the Softs behind, I knew that it would be difficult,” said Hamilton.
“I hadn’t, obviously, had any running with the McLarens. So I had no idea how strong they were earlier on in the stint, or in the race. And it wasn’t until that moment that I started to see some of their strengths and see them get stronger and stronger over the laps. So I threw it up the inside and I tried to get past”.
“But we have a little bit more drag down the straights and then through the high speed, as I said, as he mentioned, that’s where they were just murdering us. So difficult, but it was fun for those first few laps. I wish we could have stayed in that close battle for many more laps, but it wasn’t meant to be. I look forward to hopefully having some more of those battles in the future.”
Here’s Lando Norris on Max Verstappen fight
Here’s how F1 British GP panned out