Hamilton looking forward to 'more battles in the future' with Norris after British GP dice

Lewis Hamilton was full of praise for Lando Norris after finishing third behind the McLaren driver in the British Grand Prix, but their fight exposed weaknesses Mercedes needs to address.

Norris started on the front row and led for the first four laps before closely following Max Verstappen for a spell of the first stint, but he came under pressure from Hamilton after an early safety car. On the restart, Hamilton attacked on soft tires but couldn’t find a way past and Norris gradually edged away as his hard tires switched on.

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“I threw it up the inside into Turn 7 in the hope that ‘this is the moment that I'm going to make it happen’ and I pressed the overtake button…” Hamilton said. “So we’re both going down the road with the overtake but he had less drag so I guess he said they had a smaller wing and they just started pulling so I had to back out.

“But I was relatively quick in the first half of the lap and I think if you look at our qualifying laps, we were very, very close to Max (Verstappen) all the way until… I think it's until Turn 13 and then that's where they pull all their time. So we've got some work to do to improve our high speed performance.

“He is very talented, naturally, as you can see and I think is great when you can have close battles like that and rely on the driver that you're competing with to be fair and hard but fair and so there was never an element or a moment where we thought we were going to come together or anything like that.

“That's what motor racing is all about. As he wanted to hold onto second, I wanted to get that second but it wasn't meant to be. So we just get our heads down and keep pushing and hopefully we'll have some more battles moving forward.”

And Hamilton admits he was surprised that Norris was initially able to keep him at bay given the tire difference between the two, but he hadn’t been aware of how competitive the McLaren was in the opening phase of the race.

“Knowing what it's like to be on the hards on the restart at the end with someone on the softs behind, I knew that it would be difficult. I hadn't had any running with the McLarens. So I had no idea how strong they were earlier on in the stint, or in the race. And it wasn't until that moment that I started to see some of their strengths and see them get stronger and stronger over the laps. 

“So I threw it up the inside and I tried to get past. But we have a little bit more drag down the straights and then through the high speed, as I said, that's where they were just murdering us.

“So difficult, but it was fun for those first few laps. I wish we could have stayed in that close battle for many more laps, but it wasn't meant to be. I look forward to hopefully having some more of those battles in the future.”