Lando Norris is yet to get on top with his series of unfortunate race starts, after failing to convert another pole positon to a race victory in today's Italian Grand Prix at Monza.
Norris had pipped McLaren team mate Oscar Piastri to pole in qualifying on Saturday, with George Russell and Charles Leclerc lining up on the second row for the start ot today's race.
For once, Norris got a good start and took off into the first corner leaving Piastri and Russell fighting it out, which ended with the mercedes having to take to the escape road with front wing damage.
But just when Norris might have thought he had a clear road to victory, Piastri then came out of the corner in the slipstream from Norris and used that to blast his way into the lead at the second chicane.
The ambitious attack certainly seemed to catch out Norris, and Leclerc used that discombobulation to snatch second place from Norris seconds later, dumping Norris down to third place with Carlos Sainz bearing down on him.
Norris told Sky Sports F1 that he was "a little bit" surprised by how hard Piastri had run him at the start. "I feel like he got way too close for comfort. We both could have been out at that corner if I braked one metre later.
"I don't know what I should have done differently, because if I braked one metre later, we probably would have crashed," he admitted. “If I could rewind, I’d do stuff slightly differently. I would have just braked later if I'd needed to."
McLaren CEO Zak Brown put the responsibility for losing the lead on Norris, and said Piastri hasn't overreached with the way he had powered past his team mate on the opening lap.
“Lando had his mistake there where he ran a bit long, so that kind of put him out of contention," Brown commented after the race. "So we let them race to the end."
Norris did manage to undercut Leclerc in the first round of pit stops, but wasn't able to match Piastri's speed after that. It meant there was no question of McLaren imposing team orders to finetune the result.
Leclerc subsequently ended up one-stopping which put him into the lead and sealed a home win for Ferrari, leaving Piastri deeply frustrated to miss out on victory and Norris simmering by the way the race had played out.
Despite his criticism of the way Piastri had passed him, Norris conceded that the result was probably the right one today based on form. "Well done to Oscar: he did a good job, he got past me and he deserves it,
"Oscar drove a good race and so did Charles. He did a very good job, so hats off to them," he continued. "They did something with strategy that we would not be able to achieve today.
"Charles won by two seconds in the end. The fact that he got ahead probably gained him two seconds over the course of the race maybe, I don’t know.
"We thought of the one-stop - we were ready for it - but we could not achieve it," he revealed. "Our degradation was too high from the front tyres. That’s a weakness from us at the moment.
“Being the second car is tougher than being the first car, that’s just racing. Keeping up with Oscar meant I had to use more tyres, and using more tyre meant that I boxed earlier. That’s the price I paid for not being in the clean air.
“At the rear we are strong, and that’s why we’ve been strong at different races. But today was a question of front deg and we struggled too much. Clearly Charles and the Ferrari were better than us in that perspective.
“We were ready for that - for someone else to be better on the tyres - and it turned out to be the Ferraris," he admitted. "“There was not a lot we could’ve done at the time.
"If we could go back and review things, change things, we could prepare even more for it. I feel like we maximised today, we just didn’t have what Ferrari had.”
It fell to Brown to clear up one final question, that of the meaning of 'papaya rules' which was twice mentioned over the team radio when the pit wall gave Piastri and Norris permission to fight for position.
“Just ‘don’t touch’, and they didn’t.," Brown explained. “So it was good, hard racing. That’s what happens when you have two number ones. They want to both win the race and so it was clean.”
Pundits have been debating whether McLaren should have a definite number one driver given Norris is ahead of Piastri in the championship standings and the only one to have any realistic hope of applying pressure to Max Verstappen.
“We’re just focussed on getting the best results that we can and we’re doing that every weekend," Brown said.
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