Lando Norris still has to wait for his first victory in Formula 1. With first place on the grid in the sprint, he had the best starting position to end this flaw, but after the first corner the dream was shattered and Max Verstappen overtook him. The Dutchman got off to a much better start and then had no trouble.
“I have to look at it again,” says Norris after the lost start. The McLaren driver actually got off to a good start on the right side, but had the outside lane in Turn 1 and was unable to counter Verstappen’s attack.
“My actual start was good, but in the second phase I was perhaps a little too conservative,” he says. By the way, Verstappen says it the other way around: “The first part wasn’t that fantastic, but the second part was very strong and I was able to miss. That definitely helped.”
In addition, Verstappen had a significantly better reaction time from the line at 0.15 to 0.22 seconds and was therefore able to gain an initial advantage.
“It was clear to me that he would try to grab Lando in the first corner,” Red Bull motorsport consultant Helmut Marko told “ServusTV”. This played into Verstappen’s hands, who was able to control the pace from then on and ensure that the competition didn’t get into the DRS area.
Norris admits he “slept” against Russell
Incidentally, Norris himself ensured that the attack on Verstappen had to wait for the time being. Because on the first lap he was not only overtaken by the world champion, but also by George Russell, who simply drove past in the second sector. “I slept a bit there,” Norris has to admit.
But the Brit corrected that just four laps later and passed his compatriot again in Turn 1. “He pushed hard in the first few laps and I have the feeling that he paid the price for it pretty hard in laps three, four, five, six, seven, eight until the end,” said the McLaren driver.
At that point, Norris was around 1.4 seconds behind Verstappen, but he didn’t want to let him get away so easily: “I then tried to get into the DRS with Max. I thought that if I had the opportunity, I would do it early, so I can control the race a little more from the front,” he says.
“But I never got close enough and had a lot of problems with the tires in the last five laps.”
Verstappen: Not a full throttle lap
Meanwhile, Verstappen himself controlled his pace at the front. “He only drove as fast as he needed to,” emphasizes Marko on Sky. “You saw when Lando got close to the DRS, he immediately gained five tenths. And only at the end did he drive a little faster.”
The Dutchman says he has been doing tire management since the outlap. “There wasn’t a lap where I drove at full throttle. You can’t do it. Impossible,” he says. “It’s just extremely difficult with a high reduction. We had big problems with it last year, so I was very careful. Luckily it worked.”
Norris: “It was still fun”
And while Verstappen crossed the finish line as a sprint winner for the fourth time this season, Norris was once again only left with second place. He also says that he actually did tire management from qualifying onwards because he took the tire out of qualifying.
“You feel like you can’t push anywhere,” he says. “It was difficult to manage the tires as much as you would like. It was still fun,” he says. Especially since he didn’t think McLaren would be so close to Red Bull anyway.
That’s also encouraging for Sunday because all competitors except Verstappen finished far behind him. “Today we were strong compared to everyone – except Max,” says Norris
But the prospects are likely to be even better for the Red Bull driver who will start from pole on Sunday.