Lando Norris described fourth place as “the maximum” McLaren could achieve in Saturday’s Sprint at the Shanghai International Circuit, even if the deficit to Mercedes and Ferrari “sucks”.
Norris qualified third for the 100-kilometre dash but lost out to the fast-starting Ferraris of Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc at lights out, with the reigning World Champion gradually dropping away from the lead fight.
While Norris gained a position from Hamilton during the pit stop sequence under the late Safety Car, he was soon re-passed by his fellow Briton and ultimately had to settle for P4, ahead of penalised Mercedes man Kimi Antonelli.
Asked about Mercedes and Ferrari’s pace post-race, and for his general feelings, Norris said with a wry smile: “Well, I don’t feel great about that! It sucks to not be as quick as them. But I think we did the maximum today, we gave it a good try.
“It’s just difficult to… especially when it’s so cold as well, difficult to get the tyres working quickly, and the Ferrari could do that in a better way than we could, simply because they just have a little bit more grip at the minute.
“We know where we’re decent, we know where we’re lacking. It’s difficult to improve that much on our weak areas at the minute, but we made some progress, and we’ll keep trying to improve on it.
“But today was the best we could achieve, so I’m happy with that.”
Norris’ team mate, Oscar Piastri, crossed the line a couple of spots back in sixth, having been told to return a position to the recovering Antonelli after an opportunistic pass out of the final corner at the Safety Car restart.
“He made a mistake at the last corner, and probably did a good job to keep it on the track to be honest,” explained Piastri. “It’s a shame that… I just was opportunistic and you can’t do anything with that.
“We just didn’t have the pace. I think it was pretty clear that we didn’t have the pace of Ferrari and Mercedes then, so I don’t think it mattered too much – I think he would have come back past anyway. Clearly some work for us to do, so we’ll try and make the car a bit quicker.”
Norris, Piastri and the rest of the field will be back in action for the main Qualifying hour later on Saturday – that session due to get under way at 1500 local time.
