Lando Norris details McLaren weaknesses in pursuit of ‘balance’ to beat Alpine
The 22-year-old insists the team must improve to beat Alpine in the battle for fourth in F1’s Constructors’ World Championship
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Your support makes all the difference.Lando Norris has highlighted McLaren’s weaknesses and emphasised the need to address a lack of “balance” when transitioning from qualifying to the Grand Prix.
The Briton’s experience at the French Grand Prix outlined the team’s latest challenge when he impressed in qualifying to take P5, only to cede his position to Fernando Alonso and Carlos Sainz, who surged from the back of the grid, leaving him in P7.
Norris and teammate Daniel Ricciardo are currently battling with Alpine for fourth in the Constructors’ World Championship, with a four-point swing suffered at Circuit Paul Ricard against Alonso and Esteban Ocon.
That is the exact deficit now to Alpine in the current standings before the summer break after the Hungarian Grand Prix this weekend, with nine races remaining upon the season’s resumption, and Norris is fully aware of what needs to change.
“It shows the differences between people’s pace in qualy and races. For whatever reason, we maybe show a bit more pace in qualy,” Norris told Motorsport.com.
“The new tyres, low fuel hides a lot of our issues and problems and as soon as we get to high fuel, old tyres, all those issues are exposed and we are just quite slow.
“The balance we have definitely goes away, the balance which gives us good lap time in qualifying. I lose a few of those things. That’s why we struggle more in the race with the front end through the apexes and stuff like that.
“We made some improvements after Friday in understanding the package. It just seems as a general package it loses a bit of performance come Sunday.”
Norris maintains Alpine have been quicker all season, but is encouraged by the car’s latest updates, despite falling behind in the Constructors’ World Championship.
“Yeah, it’s true at certain tracks, but at a lot of tracks you still want a good race car,” Norris added. “You need a good package. You need one that’s good in qualifying and good in the race.
“Even though I was ahead of George [Russell, on Saturday] he still finished on the podium.
“So you probably still prefer a good race car over a qualy car throughout the season. And it’s just not what we have at the minute. We will still look into all the updates and upgrades and see what we did.
“I think a lot of them were still positive. I think we would have been even slower today, and in an even worse position [on Saturday] if we didn’t have the updates, so I think it was a lot of positives and we moved forward.
“Just Alpine are, and have been all season, much quicker than us. They have just made a lot more mistakes all season and we’d done a very good job with a lot of things to be ahead.
“So now being behind them it’s just more realistic, and where we deserve to be with the car.”