Reigning champion Norris admits McLaren are only the ‘fourth fastest team’
Lando Norris called fourth place at the Singapore Grand Prix the best McLaren could have achieved, then made clear the team wants far more.
The reigning world champion started fifth and spent the race closing on Lewis Hamilton, whose Ferrari had been left out on worn soft tyres after Ferrari pitted only Charles Leclerc under the virtual safety car. Late on, Hamilton ran wide defending from Norris, who also went off, and Kimi Antonelli passed them both to take third. Norris then took fourth from Hamilton, and teammate Oscar Piastri followed him through on the final lap to make it a McLaren 4-5.
“I can look at it in two ways,” Norris said. “Like, one, it’s not a bad result for us. I think P4 is as good as we were going to get.”
He did not believe a fight with Antonelli would have lasted. “I think I would have given Kimi [Antonelli] just a fight. You know, if I fought Lewis [Hamilton] better and Kimi [Antonelli] didn’t come past, then I think I would have been able to fight against Kimi [Antonelli] a little bit. But I think he would have come past.”
The gaps at the flag backed that up. “The gap from me to Lewis [Hamilton] was pretty much 10 seconds at the end,” Norris explained. “The gap from Kimi [Antonelli] to me was 10 seconds. So it was clear he was a lot quicker. And I think P4 was the best result we could have done.”
Norris still pointed to his own mistake in the battle for third. “I could have done a better job to fight more for the P3 and done a better job fighting against Lewis [Hamilton] and positioning my car a bit better and not going off and obviously allowing Kimi [Antonelli] to come through. But otherwise, P4 was the best we achieved today. So I’m happy we managed to do that. But we want more than what we had today.”
Singapore was Max Verstappen’s second win in a row for Red Bull, and Norris pointed to the pattern of the past fortnight. He had been caught up in the Alpine collision at the lap 36 restart in Baku on 26 September, a race McLaren left without a point while George Russell won. Eight days later at the Bahrain Grand Prix at Sepang, Norris recovered from 17th to ninth as Verstappen won and Red Bull took 35 points to McLaren’s 10.
“I mean, I think when you look at the pace of the Red Bull today, it was pretty incredible,” Norris said. “So they performed well on, let’s say, all types of tracks.”
He placed Malaysia and Baku at the bottom of McLaren’s recent form. “Malaysia was an outlier far from us in terms of the pace,” Norris continued. “It was pretty poor. I mean, Baku was poor as well, honestly.”
Sepang, he said, was explained by the surface. “Malaysia we knew because of the tarmac we were bad, but Red Bull were there. The tarmac suits our car much more here, but Red Bull are still the quickest here. So Red Bull seem like the team to be, and have clearly improved the car a lot over the last few weeks.”
McLaren are third in the constructors’ standings on 339 points, 21 clear of Red Bull, while Norris is sixth in the drivers’ championship on 201. His own reading of the pecking order is more pessimistic than the table.
“And we’ve just slipped to the back of the top four,” he said. “We’re the fourth fastest team, which means that if we finished top four today, we still did a good job and overachieved, let’s say in terms of a car result.”
Fourth was not enough for him, though. “I’m not happy with the P4. I want a podium and we want to fight for wins. So we need to keep trying to improve and bringing upgrades and making the car better.”
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