Lando Norris says the Dutch Grand Prix was another example of McLaren making bad decisions that cost the team points, something he feels has happened too often this season.
McLaren kept both drivers out on slick tires early in the race when rain was falling at Zandvoort, with Norris dropping as low as 15th when he came in on Lap 3. Having started second, that left the British driver with a mountain to climb throughout the rest of the race and he didn’t view the recovery to seventh at the checkered flag as negating the initial call.
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“I’m not going to talk too much otherwise I’ll create a headline and I’m really bad at that,” Norris said. “It’s clear we made the wrong decision, we made a bad decision, it’s something we’ll talk about and review, we’ve made a couple this season, we’ve lost too many positions and too many points with a couple of these things.
“The second part of the race we made the right decisions, one of the first to box, gained some time, a position on George (Russell), but the first one was… not great.”
However, Norris doesn’t believe strategic decisions are necessarily a weakness of McLaren’s, saying it’s just that the bad calls stick out compared to the good ones.
“It changes, I think there’s been plenty of times we made the right decision and the good decisions, and we’ve gained, but generally you remember more the ones that you lose on than you gain on, so I don’t think it’s really the same thing. I think they’re quite different, and we’ve made some good progress with a lot of it, but days like (Sunday) were evident we were a long way from where we needed to be.”
Norris survived a late scare when contact with Russell was noted by the stewards, but no further action was taken despite the Mercedes driver picking up a puncture after the light touch.
“Yeah just the cars are so sharp nowadays you touch a bit and you have four punctures all of a sudden, so, it was just good racing, we were close, wheel to wheel, I feel bad he came off that way but nothing I could have done differently.”