Lando Norris described fourth place as \u201cthe maximum\u201d McLaren could achieve in Saturday\u2019s Sprint at the Shanghai International Circuit, even if the deficit to Mercedes and Ferrari \u201csucks\u201d.<\/p>\n
Norris<\/a> qualified third for the 100-kilometre dash but lost out to the fast-starting Ferraris<\/a> of Lewis Hamilton<\/a> and Charles Leclerc<\/a> at lights out, with the reigning World Champion gradually dropping away from the lead fight.<\/p>\n While Norris gained a position from Hamilton during the pit stop sequence under the late Safety Car, he was soon re-passed by his fellow Briton and ultimately had to settle for P4, ahead of penalised Mercedes<\/a> man Kimi Antonelli<\/a>.<\/p>\n Asked about Mercedes and Ferrari\u2019s pace post-race, and for his general feelings, Norris said with a wry smile: \u201cWell, I don\u2019t feel great about that! It sucks to not be as quick as them. But I think we did the maximum today, we gave it a good try.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s just difficult to\u2026 especially when it\u2019s so cold as well, difficult to get the tyres working quickly, and the Ferrari could do that in a better way than we could, simply because they just have a little bit more grip at the minute.<\/p>\n \u201cWe know where we\u2019re decent, we know where we\u2019re lacking. It\u2019s difficult to improve that much on our weak areas at the minute, but we made some progress, and we\u2019ll keep trying to improve on it.<\/p>\n “But today was the best we could achieve, so I\u2019m happy with that.\u201d<\/p>\n Norris\u2019 team mate, Oscar Piastri, crossed the line a couple of spots back in sixth, having been told to return a position to the recovering Antonelli after an opportunistic pass out of the final corner at the Safety Car restart.<\/p>\n \u201cHe made a mistake at the last corner, and probably did a good job to keep it on the track to be honest,\u201d explained Piastri. \u201cIt\u2019s a shame that\u2026 I just was opportunistic and you can\u2019t do anything with that.<\/p>\n \u201cWe just didn\u2019t have the pace. I think it was pretty clear that we didn\u2019t have the pace of Ferrari and Mercedes then, so I don\u2019t think it mattered too much \u2013 I think he would have come back past anyway. Clearly some work for us to do, so we\u2019ll try and make the car a bit quicker.\u201d<\/p>\n Norris, Piastri and the rest of the field will be back in action for the main Qualifying hour later on Saturday \u2013 that session due to get under way at 1500 local time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lando Norris described fourth place as \u201cthe maximum\u201d McLaren could achieve in Saturday\u2019s Sprint at the Shanghai International…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":539601,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":["post-539600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539600\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/539601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}