Sprint race struggle was “my worst nightmare” says Norris after falling to eighth

Lando Norris described his sprint race performance as “my worst nightmare” after falling from sixth on the grid to finish eighth.

The McLaren driver ran wide on the first lap of the race and fell to ninth place. He managed to recover one position from Lance Stroll to score a single point but reported he was being plagued by front graining through much of the race.

The lap one mistake “didn’t help”, Norris told the official F1 channel afterwards. “I just went in a bit hot so [it was] on me. I just struggled after that.”

Norris dropped back from Stroll for several laps and only closed on the cars ahead at the end of the race.

“I didn’t really have any pace,” he said. “I struggled a lot in these conditions with the front graining, it’s like my worst nightmare so I have a lot of work to do. I was struggling a lot out there.”

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said the team must take advantage of the opportunity to change its set-up between the sprint race and the qualifying session to address the problems Norris encountered.

“On Lando’s side we struggled definitely with management of front graining,” he said. “So we didn’t have much pace in hand, in fairness, and we have some work to do to understand what to do for the race tomorrow.”

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“I think it has to do with the tyres and the fact that we grained the tyres very early in the race,” he said. “This is no excuse at all, the tyres are the same for everyone and if you want to use them well you need to do a good job from a set-up and from a driving point of view.

“So it’s just one of the many challenges and we need to nail it, both for qualifying and for the race.”

Oscar Piastri brought some cheer to McLaren by passing Max Verstappen to finish second. However Stella said the demand that placed on his tyres prevented him from attacking Lewis Hamilton, who won.

“Oscar managed to limit the damage, in a way,” said Stella. “I think his pace was strong.

“But in following and then fighting Verstappen we might have used the tyres a bit more than Lewis. Having said that, it’s all to be proven that we could be as fast as Lewis, so it will be interesting for tomorrow.”

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