Norris eyes perfection in bid to beat Verstappen

McLaren’s Lando Norris says he is searching for perfection in his quest to consistently beat Red Bull’s Max Verstappen in Formula 1.

Norris has been a close second behind Verstappen in the last two races in Canada and Spain and feels he and McLaren need to tidy up “just tiny things” to beat the world champion.

“Everything needs to be executed perfectly well and last weekend everything was not executed perfectly well,” Norris said. “And that’s where it cost us.

“I’m very happy and 99.5% I’m probably happy with.”

Norris said he felt he had been “over-critical” of his race in Spain last weekend, when being passed by Verstappen and George Russell’s Mercedes at the start cost him victory.

Verstappen was able to pass Russell at the start of the third lap, while Norris was stuck behind for the entire first stint. Norris closed to within two seconds of Verstappen by the end, but his victory in Miami in May remains his only F1 win so far.

Asked if he felt he and McLaren could strain together a series of wins, Norris said: “A run of wins… I don’t want to be over-confident and say that at all.”

But he added: “We could go on and win races. I definitely think that’s possible with how the team are performing and how I’m performing.

“But we’re against one of the best drivers ever in F1 and one of the best performing teams in F1 and then you have everyone else apart from that who can easily get in the mix too.”

The 24-year-old Briton moved into second place in the championship with his result in Spain. He is 69 points behind Verstappen with 14 races still to go, starting in Austria this weekend.

Norris said that now he had a competitive car, the frustrations are bigger any time he does not quite do the very best he can.

“I’ve only won one race,” Norris said. “That is still amazing but everything becomes relative to what you know you are able to achieve and the reason I was frustrated was that small thing cost me.

“Being in this position you are just more hungry to win and therefore you are more disappointed when you don’t. I think it’s as simple as that. And a win in F1 means an incredible amount because it’s what I’ve dreamt about since I was a kid.”

Norris felt he could also have won in Canada two weeks before Spain, but Verstappen was victorious in both races.

He and Red Bull remain the team to beat after three wins in the past five races and seven out of 10 this year, but McLaren have emerged as their most consistent challenger at the front.

Verstappen said: “We’re pushing as hard as we can, of course, to keep on improving. So that’s what we’ll try to do now in the coming races, which I think are, of course, very important to see where we’re at.

“McLaren at the moment, they’re just very solid. They’re good everywhere, every single track, kind of. And also, I think you could see in Barcelona, they were very good on their tyres. They could just push more on them compared to, I think, everyone else on the grid without actually degging off [slowing down] that much at the end of stints.

“So these are things that we have to do better. Plus, of course, our known issues with the kerbs and bumps, low speed, basically. And yeah, those are things that we try to understand better also for next year.”

Mercedes led both races with Russell, having improved following a series of upgrades, but the Briton said he believed the former champions still needed to improve their car to be regular contenders for victory.

“We’ve made a really good step,” Russell said. “But we still need that little bit extra to be in the fight week-in, week-out.”

Ferrari, who have traditionally been strong in Austria, have had a difficult last couple of races. They were the fourth fastest team behind Red Bull, McLaren and Mercedes in Spain despite a significant upgrade.

But Charles Leclerc, third in the championship two points behind Norris, said he did not believe that was indicative of a general drop in performance.

Leclerc said: “Montreal, I think we’ve identified quite well what was going wrong. And it was more down to the tyres. In Barcelona, I think it was just raw pace and we were just slower than what we expected.

“We still have some work to try and find something and understand a bit more these new parts that we are using now. However, I don’t think that the issues were the same in Montreal and Barcelona, so I don’t think it’s a trend.

“We’ve been struggling mostly with long, slow-speed corners, which here there are a little bit less. So that’s a good sign for us.

“But we’re also working on that in order to have a better car in those corners, which I think we’ve seen some good steps forward in the last few races.

“However, we were struggling then in other corners, so we’ve just got to put everything together, but we are working on it and I’m confident it will be fine this weekend.”