Lando Norris insists F1 not always about "pure success"

McLaren

Norris insists F1 not always about "pure success"

McLaren is not where it hoped to be to start the season

Ewan Gale

Saturday 2 April 2022 14:00

Lando Norris has insisted F1 is not always about "pure success" after McLaren's difficult start to the season.

The Briton and team-mate Daniel Ricciardo spent the Bahrain Grand Prix as backmarkers before Norris was able to score points in Saudi Arabia.

Neither driver has reached Q3 in qualifying as yet and referring to the struggles, Norris explained: "I don’t want to get used to it! I know my job is to make the most of it, quite simply.

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"Of course, it hurts and it’s painful knowing you could do the best job you’ve ever done and you could end up P15 or 13 or 16 or whatever.

"Formula 1 isn’t always about that, just pure success and podiums, it’s about doing the best job you can.

"I think that’s the only side of it at the moment, from my side and us as engineers here that we can focus on and the rest of it is trying to make a quicker car."

Norris places trust in engineering team

Whilst Saudi Arabia offered a glimpse of improvement for McLaren, there will still be concern as to how competitive the team can be over the course of the season.

Norris has, however, placed confidence in the engineering brains at the Woking-based team.

"It might be our philosophy, it could be many different things," he speculated when addressing what has gone wrong so far.

"James [Key] is here and overseeing everything, he’s understanding what could be going wrong and what might be the issues.

"It’s not up to me to say what we’ve done right or wrong. I think they probably know what they’ve done right or wrong or what path we’ve gone down, maybe we’ll just try a different path or something.

"James should be on top of it, he and his team at the MTC will be working hard to figure it out."