Lando Norris began the Japanese Grand Prix in third place on the grid but ultimately ended the race in fifth position, unable to defend against the Ferraris of Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc while driving his McLaren.
During a difficult Japanese Grand Prix, Lando Norris faced unexpected challenges with McLaren’s pit strategy, causing him to feel as though he was in a losing situation.
Following his third-place qualifying position for the race on Sunday, the British driver was confident that he would secure podium finishes in back-to-back races.
Unfortunately, he was unable to resist the strong competition from the Ferraris trailing behind him.
Carlos Sainz, who began in the second row alongside Norris, secured third place behind the two Red Bull drivers.
Ferrari executed team-mate Charles Leclerc’s strategy perfectly, enabling him to advance from eighth on the grid to claim fourth place.
After the race, Norris seemed disappointed and expressed his desire to discuss with his team regarding their race execution.
He commented that the race was challenging and acknowledged that compared to competitors like the Ferraris, he and his team lacked pace.
“I think everything kind of fell back in-line in terms of Red Bull, Ferrari [then] us, which is a shame. It doesn’t feel great when you start third and just kind of go backwards and kind of feel like you’re just fighting a bit of a losing battle against these guys because they can just do a lot more.
“They can go longer and extend to have a much bigger tyre delta. It’s hard to fight on a track like this, but we gave it a good shot, we did what we could have done. We’ve got the maximum points apart from these top two teams, which was all we could do.
“Charles did a good job to go that far on one set of tyres and then I’m kind of surprised we boxed as early as we did to be honest with you, because that just put it in line with what Ferrari did, and we covered George [Russell] which I just didn’t think we maybe needed to do.
This is a topic that will be covered in the briefing.
We could possibly review how we could improve our performance for P4. Making decisions in the moment is always challenging, especially when we were unaware of his pit stop.”
Andrea Stella, the team principal, supported the decision made regarding the strategy and stated that McLaren had limited options at that moment.
He mentioned that when they decided to pit Lando early in the race, they were aware that Ferrari might try to undercut them.
Stella explained that they were being proactive in their approach by having two sets of hard tires, allowing them to make an early stop.
The ultimate goal was to see if they could potentially compete for a podium finish.
And we also attempted to see if we could surpass Sergio Perez. I believed it was worth trying. This decision led us to a race that may have not been ideal in terms of overall time, but I think it was worth the attempt.
Therefore, on Lando’s side, we are pleased that we took the chance to aim for a podium finish.”