Lando Norris was left to rue a pit stop mistake that cost him a shot at challenging for a podium at the Belgian Grand Prix, with the Briton insisting that McLaren\u2019s pace was \u201ceasily good enough\u201d to fight for a better result.<\/p>\n
The reigning World Champion was already on the back foot heading into race day thanks to a 10-place grid penalty<\/a> for fitting a new power electronics unit, making the achievement of delivering \u201cone of the best laps\u201d<\/a> he\u2019s ever done in Qualifying<\/a> bittersweet.<\/p>\n While it was enough to earn him third on the timesheets, he was relegated to start from P13, but quickly began to gain positions in the opening stint. McLaren<\/a> then hung their chances on a potential late Safety Car that never materialised and Norris<\/a> became the last driver to pit, with his stop lasting a frustrating 7.8s.<\/p>\n \u201cIt should have been a lot better today, honestly,\u201d he said after settling for P7. \u201cThe pace was easily good enough for a potential podium. I mean, we just had a terrible pit stop. We were unlucky with the VSCs as well.<\/p>\n \u201cWe probably should\u2019ve taken the [stop under the] VSC. It would have been a long stint on the medium, but\u2026 I\u2019m going to save more time by boxing under the VSC than I\u2019m going to be by going five laps longer. My life was just very difficult today, but the pace was very strong, so still some positives, I guess.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite admitting that there were some encouraging signs from their performance, Norris doesn\u2019t believe that it represented any major improvement for the team, especially as both he and Oscar Piastri<\/a> finished behind drivers from Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull.<\/p>\n Asked whether they can take the improvements into the next part of the double header in Hungary, Norris replied: \u201cIt\u2019s a different track, so we definitely shouldn\u2019t get ahead of ourselves. We\u2019re still miles off comparing to the Mercedes \u2013 still half a second off yesterday [in Qualifying].<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve not changed anything on the car either, so we\u2019ve not brought upgrades. Next weekend is the first time we\u2019ll bring hopefully a good upgrade to the car. We\u2019ll see if that works properly.\u201d<\/p>\n Piastri similarly questioned what could have been after he made contact with Ferrari\u2019s Charles Leclerc<\/a> whilst trying to improve to the podium positions, with the subsequent damage leaving him vulnerable to a later pass by Lewis Hamilton<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was certainly not a straightforward race,\u201d he concluded. \u201cI felt like our pace was really good \u2013 especially at the beginning of the stints it looked strong. Obviously after the damage with Leclerc that made things definitely more difficult.<\/p>\n \u201cI struggled a lot for the rest of that stint. We were able to compensate a little bit for the second stint and it looked a bit better again. Our race definitely was a little bit more difficult than it needed to be from that point on.<\/p>\n \u201cWe definitely need a bit more, for sure. We feel like we\u2019re just that one step behind, we\u2019re always trying to hang on to the cars ahead. It\u2019s not the easiest position to be in, but hopefully the upgrades we can bring will help us with that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lando Norris was left to rue a pit stop mistake that cost him a shot at challenging for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":810774,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[573],"tags":[64,63,817,813,816,85],"class_list":["post-810773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810773","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=810773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810773\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/810774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=810773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=810773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=810773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}