McLaren ‘clearly’ slower than Aston at Spa

This Sunday at Spa-Francorchamps, McLaren came home empty-handed for the fourth time this season. Seventh on the starting grid thanks to penalties, Daniel Ricciardo stayed in the top 10 for a long time, but his second late stop saw him undercut by many drivers, so much so that he fell to 15th place. .

Seventeenth on the starting grid because of his penalty, Lando Norris did not manage to get back in the points, and if he crossed the finish line 12th just behind Alexander Albon and Lance Stroll, the Briton believes that it is a perfectly logical result for McLaren.

“I think it’s exactly what I expected”says Norris. “I found myself stuck behind the Aston [de Stroll] and the Williams [d’Albon]. I think Aston’s pace was clearly better than ours today. But the Williams is super fast in a straight line, and I was on the DRS train, there was not much I could do. I think we were just where we deserved to be.”

Ricciardo and Norris had nevertheless qualified tenth and eleventh, but the situation remains the same as in previous Grands Prix: “We are always faster on Saturday than on Sunday. In my opinion, that’s just a fact.”

Lando Norris (McLaren)

However, during this time, Alpine continues to rack up the points and takes off in fourth place in the constructors’ championship. The tricolor team has scored 68 units in the last six Grands Prix, McLaren only 30. “They are much faster than us, and that makes a big difference”confirms Norris. “Here it’s all about efficiency, having as little downforce as possible while still having a car that still performs very well in all the fast and slow corners. ‘have not.’

Next stop: Zandvoort, where McLaren had one of its worst results in 2021 with Lando Norris tenth and Daniel Ricciardo eleventh. The Englishman, however, believes the track’s characteristics are similar to those at the Hungaroring, where he was the “best of the rest” in seventh place.

“It’s a high downforce track, so hopefully it will bring us back a little bit to a pace like in Budapest. But you never know. It was our worst circuit last season. Hopefully this won’t be the case this year, because some problems we had in previous years are not necessarily so obvious this year, and we have other problems. So we’ll see. It can’t be much worse than this weekend , I hope”he concludes.

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