Lando Norris believes McLaren is “not fast enough” with its current setup at Zandvoort, where he fell behind Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc and held on to the final podium position during the Sprint.
The current World Champion missed pole position by just 0.041s mercedes‘ George Russellbut the small margin suggested he might have been able to challenge for victory in the 24-lap event.
Although he started well and stayed close to the leader, his pace gradually slowed and he reported that he had “no rearguard,” which allowed him Leclerc to close the gap before he finally took the inside line into Turn 1 and passed on Lap 18.
Norris I was then at the mercy of Kimi Antonelliwho ultimately couldn’t find a way to get on the podium and crossed the finish line in fourth place behind the McLaren driver.
Reflecting on the Sprint, Norris said: “It’s not a bad result. It’s not the best; it would have been nice to be a bit quicker today but Charles was too fast. I don’t think it was the tyres, we just lacked pace. We’re not quick enough and we’ve got some work to do.”
“We are very good at high speed, it’s just that the car is not performing at the level it needs to in the low speed corners. There is not much we can do.”
“I think we are optimizing many things. It is still a good result.
“I think we still have to be happy with the progress we have made, but we need more. We will see what we can do, we will work hard. The team is already working hard, so I hope we can do a better job.”
Although Norris did not lose to Antonelli, his teammate Oscar Piastri he did, with the Australian demoted to fifth position on the first lap. He struggled to progress from there and was unable to keep up with the top four, finishing more than 10 seconds behind Russell.
Track position was key in the Sprint, so on a weekend in which McLaren has introduced another update packageThey hope to find more performance before Qualifying at 16:00 local time.
“The beginning was a little normal,” Piastri admitted. “Charles went a lot further to the inside than I thought he was going to. I just got stuck behind him. But it seemed like the pace wasn’t great for both cars either, so there was work to do.”