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Lando Norris has dismissed claims McLaren has improved its car by a second per lap but still feels the team’s turnaround is one of the biggest seen in F1 “for a long time”.
From an abject start to the season, McLaren has thrust itself into a position as the second-quickest team behind Red Bull on the back of its upgrades delivered over two races in Austria and Britain.
The package was validated during last weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix at the end of which Norris scored a second consecutive runner-up position, and back-to-back podiums for the first time in his five-season F1 career.
The performance difference between the effective B-spec and the original iteration of the MCL60 released at the start of the year has led to some commentators suggesting the difference is a second per lap, the kind of ‘silver development bullet’ Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has often dismissed as impossible to achieve.
Norris readily acknowledges the car has made “a big, big step”, but when questioned as to the reported second per lap, he replied: “That’s a no. It’s a fact, it’s not a second.
“The biggest thing is, a lot of other teams that were competitive at the start aren’t as competitive now.
“If you look at Aston Martin, at Ferrari, they were a lot, lot closer to the front than they are now, and we just seem to have swapped positions for some reason.
“Either they’ve taken a step back, or Red Bull has taken a step forward but we weren’t expecting at all for the upgrade to help us race against them, and so far, a lot of these races, we’ve been ahead of them.
“But it’s definitely not one second. Some of these tracks we’ve been to, we’ve performed well at in the past.
“Silverstone, I was already P4 last year; Budapest, we P5, P6, so they are tracks we have done well at in the past, and now we’ve just taken another step forward.
“There are still tracks I know where we’re not going to be as competitive, and it’s not going to look like we’ve made a one-second step forward.”
Bizarrely, Norris claims the car is “not a lot different” from the one he experienced at the start of the season in which he finished 17th in the first two races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.
Simply stating “it’s just quicker”, he added: “In terms of balance, it doesn’t feel that different.
“But it doesn’t matter, we’re still fighting for podiums, and it’s a lot quicker, so that’s all I kind of asked for in a way.
“The car is still difficult to drive, it’s difficult to be consistent. I think we still need to do a better job with tyre management, which was clear from last weekend. It was one of our weaker areas.
“But I think we can be more than happy with the step forward we have made.
“As much as I’m always going to complain about certain things, because that’s what every driver does, but for us to go from where we were, struggling to get out of Q1 in the first few races, to fighting for pole, I would say it’s one of the biggest turnarounds in Formula 1 for a very long time – and during the middle of a season!
“So I’m very happy. There are always things to improve on, and that’s what we’ll try and do.”
The Spa-Francorchamps circuit for this weekend’s Belgian GP represents a different challenge, and with slow-speed corners through which the car, even in its updated configuration, does not perform.
Norris has already suggested he is “scared” as to how it will fare in arguably the slowest corner on the F1 calendar in the La Source hairpin.
Assessing his expectations, particularly with wet weather forecast throughout, Norris remarked: “Spa is one of my favourite circuits of the season, and in conditions in which we generally perform pretty well, there is no reason why we shouldn’t say we can’t continue on from where we’ve been.
“It’s another challenge for us in terms of circuit and layout and another opportunity for us to see where the car really stands.
“We’ll see what the conditions are going to do first of all, so I’m not going to say ‘no’ (McLaren will not do well) but it could be a trickier weekend than the last few.”
