F1 | Norris disappointed: “Single stop impossible, Ferrari more effective”

It was a visibly disappointed Lando Norris who appeared before the microphones at the end of the Monza race. The British driver in fact finished the race only in third place after starting from the pole position he had earned on Saturday, also missing the opportunity to recover points on a struggling Max Verstappen, thanks to a Red Bull that did not shine on the Stradale.

It is a McLaren that, clearly, is licking its wounds because, when you monopolize the front row, going out once again without a victory is a result that is difficult to digest, because the feeling is that of not having been able to realize the potential, wasting an opportunity. Precise analysis will be needed to understand what the Papaya team could have done differently, which suffered so much from that understeer that had somehow undermined the balance of the Ferrari on Saturday.

Everything went wrong from the first lap, when Norris was overtaken by his teammate at the Roggia chicane with a nice outside move, as effective as it was tough, which changed the race scenario a bit.

An overtaking move that Norris didn’t particularly digest, also because it could have put at risk, in his opinion, the team result: “I don’t know what I should have done differently at that moment. If I had braked a meter later, we probably would have crashed, so it’s an aspect to evaluate. But, in short, Ferrari had a better race today, especially Charles. He did a great job. So hats off to them”, said Norris at the end of the race, underlining the good race by the Reds, capable of beating McLaren with the one-stop strategy.

McLaren was the team that pushed the race towards two stops while the Reds, once they understood that they could have finished third and fourth, decided to try the single stop, the one that had been hypothesized before the race, maximized with an exceptional Leclerc in managing it.

However, Norris said a one-stop strategy would not have been possible for McLaren, which suffered so much from graining on the front left. It is possible that McLaren expected a much more aggressive race on the rear and in the end the balance was more towards the front than the rear: “We thought about doing a one-stop for the whole race, but that was not possible with the amount of graining I had. So yeah, it was a difficult race,” Norris added, before adding how being in the slipstream in the dirty air behind Piastri hurt his race, paying the price for not running in clean air.

“We knew we were all going to be close, but with our car and some limitations that we have, today it wasn’t possible. So we knew, we knew it could be a possibility. We’re disappointed, obviously, but Ferrari did a better job, they had a better car today, and hats off to them.”