Lando Norris has conceded he needs to make “better decisions” as McLaren aims to draw a line under his clash with team-mate Oscar Piastri in Singapore.
Norris drew the ire of his team management for taking out both himself and Piastri with a lunge for fourth place in the Singapore sprint race, costing the team valuable points in the championship and going against its racing principles.
Team principal Andrea Stella said after the Singapore race that the team would hold further talks at its Woking factory to avoid a repeat. It is understood those talks happened last week, and that the team is now keen to move on from the incident as Norris apologised for his error of judgement.
“I take responsibility for my mistakes, and I learn from them,” Norris was quoted in the team’s United States Grand Prix preview. “This team is my motivation every weekend, and my aim is to repay the hard work everyone puts in by improving, making better decisions, and representing the team in the best possible way.”
Norris’s clash with his team-mate added to what had been a tough triple-header as McLaren had no answer for the significant performance upgrades Red Bull was able to add to its car, leading to back-to-back wins for Max Verstappen in Malaysia and Singapore.
“After a difficult triple-header, we take the lessons learned from both our performance and execution and put them into action,” Stella added. “In F1, success is never guaranteed – so our response is to keep building, keep developing, and keep pushing forward together as one team.”
Lando Norris, McLaren, Oscar Piastri, McLaren
Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images
McLaren brings latest round of upgrades after performance falls flat
McLaren had brought its own upgrades to the MCL40 too, and while it was left confused by its lack of performance in Malaysia, Singapore further underlined that while its own upgrades appear to work as intended, it had simply been out-developed by Red Bull, while Ferrari was also extremely strong on the high-downforce Singapore street circuit and Mercedes has also added performance to its car.
McLaren is now bringing its latest round of relatively minor upgrades to the car at this weekend’s race in Austin, largely focused on the front of the car, as it hopes the Circuit of the Americas will suit the car better than the likes of Baku and Singapore did. It has also applied further tweaks to make its drivers feel more confident under braking.
“We’re bringing a modest selection of upgrades for this event, aimed at improving some braking reliability and performance issues,” said chief designer Rob Marshall. “We also have some small floor changes to test.
“We have all seen how difficult it is to predict the relative performance of the top teams over the last five or six races. Obviously, there are many factors in play here: cars being upgraded, cars suiting and drivers liking certain circuits among other factors. The last few races have not been great for us, but I think we’re getting stronger again and Austin is probably a better circuit for our car.”
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