Lando Norris makes feelings clear with more questions on McLaren contract

Relieved by McLaren’s podium-scoring gains, Lando Norris says even during the tough times there was never a point where he thought “this is not where I want to be”.

Lining up on the grid for the fifth time this season as a McLaren driver, Norris and the team were aware right at the beginning of the season that they were in for a difficult start with McLaren acknowledging they’d missed their targets with the MCL60.

Scoring in just three of the first eight races, McLaren put a “kind of a B-spec” car on the track at the Austrian Grand Prix and it immediately paid dividends.

Lando Norris never thought about quitting McLaren

Additional reporting Thomas Maher and Sam Cooper

That Sunday Norris was fourth before going on to secure back-to-back P2 results at Silverstone and Hungary. Both races could have yielded double podiums for McLaren with his team-mate Oscar Piastri in contention early in the races.

麦克拉伦的收益,the team scoring 70 points in three races, have put the Woking team P5 in theConstructors’ Championshipwhile Norris is up to eighth in the Drivers’ standings.

“I guess relief,” he told the media including PlanetF1.com ahead of the Belgian Grand Prix weekend, “but at no point did I think… there are frustrating times and just difficult times, but at no point did I think ‘this is not where I want to be’.

“I guess there’s always a bit of relief, just going from any difficult situation to having such a big change around. Even if we took half the step we did take, I think we still would have seen that as a positive sign. But the step was even bigger than we were expecting.

“Of course it’s relief, but not just for myself, I think for the whole team. We kind of took quite a big step back over the winter to reassess everything that we’re doing, and the route we’re taking and that’s why we were quite delayed with putting the upgrades that we’ve had in place onto the car. But we took our time and we had to stay patient.

“Of course, there are some times when I wished we had a more competitive car and I wished that we could have started the year in a smoother way, especially because last year the start of the season was also very tough. It doesn’t give you a lot of hope in the beginning of the year when you struggle as much as what we did.

“But I’m still always very happy to be with the team that I’m with, I still have a lot of faith that McLaren are able to achieve their goals and at the same time achieve my goals, which is to win races and to win Championships with them.

“And when you have upgrades and situations like this, then of course there’s relief: These are very positive signs that we can jump ahead of Aston, jump ahead of Ferrari, fight against Mercedes, and not be far off a Red Bull from one upgrade, you know?”

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Downplays talk of a one-second gain

It has been suggested by rivals that McLaren’s upgrades, of which the team says there are more to come, are worth as much as one second per lap.

That was downplayed by Norris, who says McLaren’s gains have been exaggerated by the likes of Aston Martin and Ferrari losing ground.

“No. It’s no. I don’t think it is,” he said. “It’s a fact, it’s not a second.

“I think that the biggest thing is a lot of other teams that were competitive and start aren’t as competitive now. If you look at Aston Martin, if you look at Ferrari, they were a lot closer to the front than they are now and we just seem to have swapped positions for some reason.

“I don’t know if they’ve taken a step back or Red Bull have taken a step forward or what, but, yeah, we weren’t expecting at all to… We were expecting the upgrade to help us race against them and so far, at a lot of these races, we’ve been ahead of them. It’s definitely not one second.

“I think some of these tracks that we’ve been to, we’ve performed well at in the past, you know. Silverstone I was already P4 last year. Budapest already last year, we were P5 or P6 or something. They’re tracks we have performed well at in the past and now we’ve just taken another step forward.

“But like I said, there’s some tracks that I know we’re not going to be as competitive at and then it’s not going to look like we made a one-second step forward. So yeah, we’ll see. But the team have obviously done an extremely good job, and we’re continuing to try to make another step.”

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