Lando Norris was clear that McLaren took a wrong decision with regards to its strategy in Dutch GP, but he is happy to come back from it.
Having positioned themselves well in qualifying, it went downhill for McLaren after they elected not to pit straight up in F1 Dutch GP to switch to intermediate tyres. By the time they did, they were on the backfoot having lost track position.
Although both Norris and Oscar Piastri did climb back up in the points, but the Brit wasn’t happy with the strategy decisions which hampered his grand prix. “It’s clear we made the wrong decision, we made a bad decision,” he said to media. “It’s something we will review and talk about and discuss because I guess we’ve made a couple this season.
“We’ve lost too many positions and lost 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. We were one of the first ones to box and we gained some time, we gained a position on George, things like that. But the first one was just not great.”
The second rain stop was right on call which helped him retain the gained places after the first run. But the strategy decisions has been bit of a hit and miss as the big one that comes to their mind is losing out in such conditions in 2021 Russian GP.
“There’s been plenty of times we made the right decision in mixed conditions, and good decisions and we’ve gained,” said Norris. “Generally you remember more the ones that you lose on than you gain on. I think we’ve made some good steps and some good progress with a lot of it.”
The Brit was harsh on the pace side too where he felt they did not look good against Aston Martin and Mercedes even though overall the pace was decent enough. “I don’t think the pace is bad, the pace was okay,” said Norris. “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 our 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.”
Here’s George Russell on contact with Lando Norris
Here’s Lando Norris presenting Hungarian GP trophy to Max Verstappen