McLaren deserved Alpine championship defeat - Norris

Lando Norris has conceded McLaren deserved its championship defeat to Alpine.

The Woking-based team had spent the last two seasons at the front of F1's midfield and was touted to take a step towards Mercedes and Red Bull as the sport ushered in new technical regulations.

But whilst Ferrari did make that step forward to become a race-winning team, McLaren took a step backwards and instead found itself in a tussle with Alpine for fourth in the standings.

Norris was in fine form throughout the season but was lacking support from the struggling Daniel Ricciardo and despite the Briton outscoring both Esteban Ocon and Fernando Alonso, the cumulative score was not enough to head the French manufacturer.

"It’s where we deserve to be, P5.

"I guess you feel very disappointed when there’s a shot at P4 and you feel you could have had it but we’ve had one bad weekend of reliability. Alpine have had four or five.

“They’ve been the quicker car for the majority of the year so I think to have kept in the fight with them for so long proves how good of a job we have done with a worse package honestly. And therefore, that is why I’m quite happy.

“We’re P5 but there are a lot of good things about the job that we are doing, it’s just that you need a good car and we’ve just started too far behind at the beginning of the season.

“Hopefully, we can start much higher up next year, make the development and the progress that we did this season and we’ll be much better off.”

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