The 2022 Formula 1 French Grand Prix was not the best race of the year for Lando Norris, who admitted his lack of pace and does not blame the piece of car that he recovered from the right pontoon of his MCL36 in the parc fermé that had accompanied him during part of the appointment.
Television footage showed the young driver retrieving the missing item after getting out of his car, before examining it and throwing it into his cockpit.
McLaren have confirmed to Motorsport.com that the part got stuck in their car in the closing stages of the test, and that it had no impact on Norris’ race.
The Englishman had done a great job to qualify fifth with a car packed with improvements, but a poor start saw him lose position to Russell and Fernando Alonso. Later, he would recover one of them due to Leclerc’s accident, which he would lose again to his old teammate, Carlos Sainz.
“My wheels spun a little bit,” he said when asked by Motorsport.com about his departure. “But I don’t think it changed our career in any way, Fernando [Alonso] would have passed me anyway.”
“I think today we have achieved everything that we should have done. It’s frustrating because I guess, after yesterday, our hopes had gone up a little bit.”
“I think it was more because I did a very, very good lap, to be in the middle of the Mercedes, and they showed that they are almost in contention to win.”
Norris admitted that, at the moment, McLaren is stronger in qualifying than in long runs, which are key to racing.
“This shows the differences between people’s pace, and in qualifying and in the races. For whatever reason, maybe we showed a bit more speed in qualifying.”
“New tires and low fuel hide a lot of our problems, and as soon as we go to high fuel and old tyres, all those problems are exposed and we’re just pretty slow,” confessed the young British driver.
“Definitely, the balance that we have disappears, the one that is giving us a good lap time and a good classification. Some of those things are lost. And that is why we had a worse time in the race with the front end in the corners” .
“We’ve made some improvements since Friday in terms of understanding the updates, but it looks like as a general package it loses a little bit of performance on Sunday,” Norris said.
The Englishman acknowledged that his qualifying pace can come in handy at places like the Hungaroring , but said he would rather have speed on Sundays.
“Yes, it’s true at some circuits, but at many of them you still want a good car for the race. You need a good package, one that is good in qualifying and good on Sunday. Because even though I was ahead of George Russell yesterday [Saturday], he finished on the podium.”
“So you’ll probably still prefer a good race car to a qualifying car throughout the season. And it’s not what we have at the moment, we’ll keep looking at all the updates and improvements and see what we’ve done.”
“I think a lot of them are still positive, I think we would have been even slower today, and even worse yesterday [Saturday], if we didn’t have the updates, so I think there were a lot of positives and we went forward,” Norris explained.
“Just the Alpines are, and have been, a lot quicker than us all season. They just made a lot more mistakes all season, and we’ve done a really good job with a lot of things to stay ahead. So now being behind them is more realistic, and where we deserve to be with the car.”
Norris admitted that the race at the Paul Ricard layout had not been easy, especially with his personal choice not to use a drink bottle .
“Difficult, a bit of wind. Especially in the long right-hand corner where Charles Leclerc crashed, there was a gust of wind that seemed to pull the car at times. And the temperatures were very high. So managing the tires was very difficult.” .
“Especially knowing that if you want to make one stop to get to the end with a good pace, you needed to protect them a lot at the beginning, to have that confidence that you’re going to get to the end.
“It’s hard, and even physically, I still don’t use a water bottle, it makes me feel too sick. So I can’t use it. I can’t take too many liquids when I ride, because I throw it up, so that’s why I avoid it,” Norris concluded. .
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