Lando 'stuck in a circle' - but somehow still ends up P7!

Lando Norris was as confused by anyone as to what exactly happened to him in today's Belgian Grand Prix. He started from seventh on the grid and crossed the line in P7 after 44 laps - but in between, he was all over the place.

Norris watched on helpless as his team mate Oscar Piastri started on the row ahead but got squeezed into the wall at La Rouge by Carlos Sainz, causing race-ending damage to both of those cars.

That should have given Norris the chance to make up some early positions, but instead he ended up losing spots and pitting early on lap 5 - where the team made the ill-fated choice to put him on the hard compound.

"It was terrible," he told the media afterward. "That's an honest answer. We were just stuck in a circle of not being able to push enough in the middle sector because of the cars ahead.

"People [behind were] having to lift in Eau Rouge, we were that slow," he said. "I was getting overtaken before the DRS zone even started.

“I was barely making eighth gear,” he continued. “I was that slow on the straights. I just couldn’t defend, I couldn't attack. It was impossible to overtake. I didn’t overtake one person on the straights, I was too slow.

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"Honestly, I had a run on Alex [Albon] out of turn 1: I had new tyres, he had old tyres, and I think by the end of the straight he pulled three or four car lengths from me!

"I only overtook two or three people today and that was all in the corners. It was painful. So we had to try something. We went on to the hards, and that was even worse. No one's ever used the hard all weekend!

"We thought it normally kind of suits us, so I think it was the right decision to try. But it was still terrible. I didn't have enough laps to get the tyres in and be able to push."

By the midpoint of the race he was still only P15 and far outside the points before pitting for a second time to dump the hated hard compound for softs. And then a funny thing happened on the way to the finish line.

"We had one thing left to try and that was to put a soft tyre on, and this was on lap 24, lap 25," he said. "We put the soft on and everything came back towards us." But Norris didn't think the tyres would last to the finish.

"I was expecting to box again for another soft at some point," he said. "We undercut like ten cars I think, which I was pretty surprised by. A good surprise of course, but I thought I’d be boxing again.

“[The team] were like, 'We're going to try and go to the end,'" he said disbelievingly. "I'd pushed the tyres so much in the beginning I thought my race was going to be pretty much over and I was going to start to struggle too much.

"But we kept the tyres alive and stayed in P7, stayed ahead of Esteban [Ocon] who was closing quite quickly," he continued. "I don't know how I ended up P7. I felt like I was last for the most part. A little bit surprised, honestly."

Overall Norris was critical of how he and the team had approached the race. "We got it wrong, we’ve admitted it already. We were way too high on downforce and it didn’t help us out in any way."

The team had gone for the high downforce setting to deal with the wet conditions on Friday and Saturday - but it backfired on Sunday where the race started and finished in the dry.

"We just need to rethink how we approach the weekend," he ventured. "The wing level and stuff like this might work on [some circuits] but it doesn't work on all of them, and we clearly got it wrong [at Spa].

"[It's] how we treat the tyres with suspension. Everything like that is not where we want it to be. It's about the balance, not just about adding load to the car."

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