Lando Norris was pleased to disprove McLaren’s doubters after finishing on the podium for the second race in a row.
The team endured a poor start to the year but have transformed their season after introducing a major upgrade to their car at the Austrian Grand Prix. Norris finished fourth there, took second at Silverstone and repeated that result today.Having qualified third he was passed by Oscar Piastri at the start, but gained a place from Lewis Hamilton. He got back ahead of his team mate by making an earlier first pit stop. From there he was able to out-run Sergio Perez, who arrived in third place but not soon enough to catch the McLaren.
Norris said it had been a “tough race” at the Hungaroring.
“Not an easy one, especially with Checo catching at the end, but he didn’t have enough pace to catch up. So I’m happy, I had to fight for a little bit in the beginning, I got a bit screwed over in turn one but another podium for us and for McLaren which is amazing.”
“But at the minute those guys are too quick, unless they make mistakes or something happens,” he added.
“At the minute, I think we’re very happy with the progress we’ve made to go from where we were four or five races ago, struggling to get out of Q1 sometimes to fighting for poles and fighting for podiums. We’ll take it for now, and our time will come later on in the year.”
McLaren’s mid-season resurgence is down to “a lot of hard work and great teamwork,” said Norris.
“Everyone back in the factory did an amazing job. I think we knew it in the beginning we were going to struggle and we looked pretty poor.
“We got a lot of abuse for McLaren in saying they weren’t doing a good enough job, but I’m happy we’ve finally proved some people wrong.”
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2023 Hungarian Grand Prix
- Was F1’s Alternative Tyre Allocation test successful? Drivers and teams have their say
- How far can McLaren climb with car rivals now say is the second-fastest in F1?
- Why Ricciardo says McLaren’s car “speaks Lando’s language” – but Norris disagrees
- Mercedes reveal cooling error behind loss of pace in Hungarian GP
- Perez answered critics in Hungary but needs to qualify better – Horner
DaveW (@dmw)
23rd July 2023, 16:35
Hope it’s not their turn to get the vapors after Aston Martin and Mercedes had major uPgRaDeS and then faded back into obscurity.
BasCB (@bascb)
23rd July 2023, 20:35
I sure hope we can see McLaren build on this @dmw. They did show they were able to turn the season around last year already and they knew they were not on target in the winter and already started that change to the car, a bit like AM did last year.
McLaren do seem to be in a good place to build on their improvements, it seems they unlocked a good development path and they have been pretty good keeping that up in the last few years.
Prashanth Ramadas
27th July 2023, 11:30
Mark Webber was very good at controlling his emotions.