“No excuses” Norris delivers damning verdict on McLaren as he admits car is 'not good enough'

Lando Norris has admitted that the McLaren MCL40 is “not good enough” after a frustrating qualifying session for the Woking team at Silverstone left him in sixth place, two spots ahead of team mate Oscar Piastri.

Norris was only P11 in Q1, and he just scraped out of Q2 in P10, and he delivered what he called an “amazing lap” to move up the order when it mattered. However the gap of 0.766s to pole man Kimi Antonelli told its own story.

“I mean, just tough, we still don't have any pace,” he said when asked by Crash.net about the performance. “It was seven-tenths of pole, and I thought my lap was pretty amazing. I was very happy with my lap, improved in every single corner, and I felt like I got everything out of the car.

“So we're just slow, the car was slow in the straights, we're slow in all the corners. There's nothing more I can say apart from that. The car is not very efficient at the minute, which makes it pretty unbelievable that we finished P3 yesterday, considering we're seven-tenths off. “There's no excuses, the car's not good enough, and we know that, and we just have to keep working hard, that's it.”

While Silverstone put an extra focus in the team’s form, Norris insisted that nothing has really changed in recent weeks.“It's not often we've been better than P6 this year,” he said. “This track is the perfect highlight of an efficient car, one that's quick in the straight and is good in corners.

“We're bad in both. I was four-tenths off in Austria, in a one-minute track. This is one-minute thirty, and I'm seven-tenths off, so it makes sense. We're not slower, we're just the same. I felt happier in the car today. I felt like we got a lot more out of it. Maybe my lap yesterday was just magical, and everyone else didn't do a good job, and today other people did a good job.”

Norris went on to say his P3 in the sprint made him more impressed with his own performance given how difficult the following session was.

He said: "I mean when you look at this, it makes me more impressed by my own job. If we're 7/10ths off on a single lap, you know, the fact that we could finish P3 earlier today was pretty insane."

However the reigning world champion said there needed to be more urgency within the team to catch up with the rest of the field. He said: “The team knows that time's not on our side, we don't have all day, and all week and all month, to slowly understand it.

“We've got to understand the car now and we've got to bring parts to the car as quickly as possible and quicker than any other team. So, that's just the level we're having to perform at.”