Lando Norris felt Top 5 was a possible result in F1 Italian GP in one of his best races of 2022, as Daniel Ricciardo adds on his strategy.
It was mixed end to McLaren’s race in F1 Italian GP where despite Alpine not scoring, the Woking-based team couldn’t capitalise much in terms of trimming the points difference after Norris ended up only seventh with Ricciardo retiring.
In fact, it wasn’t a good start from Norris which dropped him couple of places and he fell in a DRS train led by his own teammate Ricciardo. The Brit felt a Top 5 result was possible after recovery drives from Carlos Sainz, Lewis Hamilton and Sergio Perez.
His start was undone due to incorrect setting and he couldn’t do much about it. “With the start, it’s nothing I could have done,” said Norris to media. “It was just settings for the launch, which you have to have and you can’t adjust once the one minute signal goes or whatever, you’re not allowed to change it. So nothing I could have done.
“They told me and I kind of expected something poor. Of course, when the lights go out, you have to react and you feel like you’ve got to get going but yeah, something that’s never happened probably will never happen again. It was up and down, I probably should have finished P5. So I’m a bit disappointed, extremely poor launch because of incorrect settings. Nothing I could have done differently really and then a poor pitstop, which probably cost us the position to Lewis, whether or not he would have passed me after a few laps, quite possibly.
“But we would have had a race and an opportunity. And maybe I could have hung on to the safety car. So yeah, fifth was where we should have been but we ended up seventh,” summed up Norris, who elaborated on being in the DRS train which was more of a patience and management game more than anything else.
“I just went extremely long on the first stint,” said Norris. “I think I boxed like lap 35 or 36. I would say it was probably one of my best races in Formula 1 in terms of management and being patient with things and so on. I would say it’s been one of my best I’ve done definitely this year, but almost in Formula 1.
“So I just P7 doesn’t feel like it accomplishes a lot for what I feel like I did today, but that’s life it happens. And we’ll learn from it and move on,” summed up Norris, as teammate Ricciardo was pleased for holding off Pierre Gasly for both his stints, but it was undone due to the failure which came out of the blue with no warnings.
“I was trying to break it but just simply not quick enough. If I tried to just get a few more tenths, I’m sliding and killing the tyres, so it was tricky,” said Ricciardo to media. “But I felt like I just had enough to hold off Gasly, but once Carlos and these guys came through it’s tough. In terms of strategy, we had to react.
“And even the hard, it was – I mean, I got out of the pits and Gasly was right behind, so that was certainly pretty tight. But then it was hard to really get a real peak performance out of that tyre, but we couldn’t go long enough to then fit the softs. Lando was able to go long, I think I was probably doing a good job holding up Gasly and that allowed him to then – he had I guess good pace and then fit the soft. He came out in the pack, it was a bit messy,” summed up Ricciardo.
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