Lando Norris says the race pace of his upgraded McLaren MCL60 in Sunday's Austrian Grand Prix was "better than expected" which left the Briton happy at the end of the day.
Norris was the sole recipient at the Red Bull Ring of McLaren's upgrade package that included revised sidepod inlets, a new floor and a modified coke/engine cover on its MCL60.
The Briton qualified an impressive fourth on Friday but feared that he would rapidly regress on race day.
But he actually only briefly dropped out of the top five during the 71-lap event, concluding his day fifth on the road before gaining a position several hours after the race thanks to the raft of penalties belatedly handed out to eight drivers – including Carlos Sainz who had finished fourth – for track infringements.
"I was a bit nervous coming into the race, honestly, that the race pace was going to let us down a lot today," he said. "But actually, it was better than I was expecting, which is a good surprise.
"[It’s] still not great – Fernando was clearly quicker at the end by quite a chunk every lap and I’m like almost crashing in every corner. But to be P5 shows that we’ve taken a good step forward so I’m very happy with that."
While McLaren's latest update – the first of three packages that will be implemented in upcoming races – has visibly improved the MCL60's aerodynamic efficiency, Norris noted that the car remained a difficult beast to master.
"Things that we’ve been complaining about all year are still the same, we’re just at a higher level," he explained.
"So I feel like I can be more confident if we can really tackle these issues. I feel like they’re letting us down a lot at the minute.
"So it’s not just about downforce, it’s about the handling and how you drive the car, not just putting a load more downforce on it and kind of sending it.
"So more technical things we need to try and tackle and understand. When we do that, I’m confident we can definitely fight some of the quicker cars ahead of us.
"So there’s plenty of things to work on and I think we’ve got more things coming next weekend, so I don’t want to get too ahead of ourselves.
"I think this has always been our best race of the whole year, so I’ll make sure I’ll let everyone in the team know that, just to keep our heads down and then stay cool for next weekend."
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