Norris: McLaren race pace still 'not good enough'

Lando Norris says McLaren's race pace relative to its rivals still isn't good enough, an assertion made after the Briton finished seventh in the Dutch Grand Prix.

Norris had clocked in second behind poleman Max Verstappen in Saturday's qualifying at Zandvoort, but come race day, the McLaren driver was never a force to be reckoned with as a podium contender.

However, while Norris highlighted the MCL60's relative weakness in race trim, he also pointed to McLaren's botched strategy in the tricky wet-dry-wet event as a reason for his underperformance.

"There are times when it's down to pace and times when it's down to strategy, and the strategy is what messed us up today," he said.

"I don't think the pace is bad, the pace was okay. Not good enough, if you want to say what was our pace compared to Aston's? It was pretty terrible. Compared to Mercedes? Pretty terrible.

"So our pace today was a long way off our pace that we showed yesterday in qualifying. And our one-lap is still a lot more competitive than our race pace.

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"I think that's becoming more and more evident. And we're doing whatever we can to fix it and make steps forward, but at the minute it's nowhere near enough."

Those drivers who immediately switched to the intermediate tyre when the rain began to fall on the opening lap of the race were rewarded for the call.

Unfortunately, McLaren only called in Norris on lap 3 while his teammate Oscar Piastri remained out on track on the soft tyre. In both cases, it was an ill-fated decision by team papaya's strategists.

"I think it's clear we made the wrong decision, and we made a bad decision," Norris asserted.

"It's something we'll review and talk about and discuss because I guess we've made a couple this season and we've lost too many positions and lost a lot of points throughout this year with a couple of these things.

"The second part of the race we made up for it, well not made up for it, but we made the right decision and were one of the first ones to box [when the rain returned], and we gained some time, we gained a position on George [Russell] and things like that. But the first one was just, not great."

As Formula 1 moves on to the Italian Grand Prix this week, Norris is anticipating a difficult race weekend at Monza's Temple of Speed given McLaren's straight-line speed weakness, a deficit that was on display last month at Spa.

"I think like Andrea [Stella] said there's been so much focus on trying to get the car we have now - which is the completely correct decision to have done - so much focus and time spent on creating this, there are some things we're quite far behind on," he said.

“But I'd happily take 80% good races and 20% bad rather than vice versa. We know it, I think we admit it, which is always a good thing. We know we're probably in for a pretty tough race.

“I doubt the weather is going to be as helpful. Maybe it is, but straights are still our weakness at the minute, and we'll see what we can come up with."

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