We’re not doing anything wrong, we’ve got the car! We just have to keep working, said Norris on McLaren’s tragic VC Miami

The fifth race of this year’s F1 season, the Miami Grand Prix, was won by Max Verstappen. Sergio Pérez came in second, giving Red Bull another double. However, the race did not go well at all for McLaren, which did not take a single point and continues its rather tragic season. How did Lando Norris comment on the Miami Grand Prix from the British team’s point of view?

McLaren, unfortunately for its fans, continues a tragic and disappointing season. Even before the start of the season, the British team said that the 2023 season would be one big disaster due to the technological development of the car.

And so far, that’s coming true. Yes, McLaren has scored 14 points so far this season and is at least fifth in the Constructors’ Cup, but after the performance improvement in 2021, everyone in the team simply had other goals.

Last year, the Woking-based stable scored 159 points, with Lando Norris providing the bulk of the scoring. However, it was only good enough for fifth place in the constructors’ standings. And this year, it seems to be a lot worse.

Norris’s best finish in the current season is sixth place from the Australian Grand Prix, but that was also thanks to an incredible, perhaps even Hollywood-like finish to the race. Otherwise, the young Briton scored two more points in Azerbaijan, finishing seventeenth three times.

His teammate Oscar Piastri has scored four points so far, for eighth place in Australia. He failed to finish in Bahrain, finished fifteenth in Saudi Arabia, eleventh at the Baku circuit and now nineteenth in Miami.

However, McLaren’s poor placing in the Miami Grand Prix is also due to their choice of race strategy. In fact, Norris and Piastri were the only drivers in the starting field to use the softest tyre compound marked in red for the start of the race.

And it simply didn’t work. Norris went to his mechanics for a tyre change after just three laps, Piastri after four. Both of them, of course, changed to the hard set, and because of the pit-stop they fell to the very tail of the starting field.

It should be noted, due to the performance of the McLaren cars, both drivers were some of the slowest on the track. On lap 41, for example, Piastri clocked a time of 1:34.421, clearly the worst lap time of all. On the other hand, after more than 40 or 50 laps on the hardwood, not much could be expected from the McLaren drivers.

We’re not doing anything wrong, we just have to keep working

“It was a long race. It’s hard (when you don’t have the speed to fight with the others). We just have to keep trying to keep doing what we’re doing,” Norris said in a post-race interview with F1 TV.

“We’re not doing anything wrong, we have the car to do it. We just have to get ready for the next meeting and keep working,” the McLaren driver commented on the choice of strategy.

The next race on the Formula 1 schedule is the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix on May 21. Max Verstappen leads the drivers’ championship after Miami, with Red Bull also leading the Constructors’ Cup.

Sources