Lando Norris questions McLaren pit stop call after 'fighting a losing battle'
Lando Norris wants to discuss McLaren's Japanese Grand Prix strategy with the team.
Lando Norris wants to discuss McLaren’s strategy after disagreeing with the team’s decision to pit him earlier than his rivals at the F1 Japanese Grand Prix.
The Briton held onto third place in the early stages of Sunday’s race at Suzuka but ultimately dropped behind Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc and finished fifth.
Norris admitted he was frustrated to be “fighting a bit of a losing battle” against the Ferrari duo but also questioned McLaren’s call to pit him early on Lap 12.
“It was a tough race,” Norris told Sky F1. “I think compared to those guys who had better pace, compared to the Ferraris, just not enough.
“I think everything kind of fell back in-line in terms of Red Bull, Ferrari, us, which is a shame. It doesn’t feel great when you start third and just kind of go backwards and kind of feel like you’re just fighting a bit of a losing battle against these guys because they can just do a lot more.
"They can go longer and extend to have a much bigger tyre delta.
“It’s hard to fight on a track like this, but we gave it a good shot, we did what we could have done. We’ve got the maximum points apart from these top two teams, which was all we could do.
“Charles did a good job to go that far on one set of tyres and then I’m kind of surprised we boxed as early as we did to be honest with you. Because that just put it in line with what Ferrari did, and we covered George [Russell] which I just didn’t think we maybe needed to do.
“This is something we’ll discuss during the briefing. Maybe a discussion of we could have done a better job for P4. It’s always difficult to make those decisions at the time, we didn’t even know that he was going to pit.”
Norris was quick to shoot down suggestions that McLaren and Ferrari are now ‘neck-and-neck’ in the battle behind Red Bull.
“No, Ferrari is clearly ahead,” Norris insisted. “They’ve been ahead all year, they’re still ahead.
“We’ve not changed anything, there’s no reason why we should be ahead.”
