Norris expected to be ‘nowhere near top three’ in Chinese GP

Lando Norris says his second place at the Chinese Grand Prix came as such a surprise because he expected to be “nowhere near top three” based on the Sprint.

McLaren struggled for race pace compared to Red Bull and Ferrari in the Sprint, with Norris losing the lead at the start of the race and slipping to seventh, eventually finishing sixth. As a result he thought fifth place was McLaren’s likely best finish from his starting position of fourth behind the Red Bulls and Fernando Alonso, but he cleared the Aston Martin early on and then used strategy to beat Sergio Perez to second.

“A big improvement today compared to yesterday,” Norris said. “So I think that's why we were probably a bit surprised. I'm surprised to be sitting here today, but it's a nice surprise of course. Difficult to say, we've been struggling a little bit -- I'm sure everyone does -- with certain things throughout the whole season, which have always been limiting us.

“It probably felt similar-ish to Australia. Australia, I felt comfortable and the car felt pretty good as well. So just much better today, things came alive today, the conditions cooled down, the wind calmed down and both of these things, I think, played into our hands a little bit more.

“That's why yesterday, if you asked me, ‘What do we expect for today?’ it definitely was nowhere near top three, or even maybe top five. So, a pleasant surprise. The car felt much better, but obviously, not quick enough to match the Red Bulls.”

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Norris insists there was no downplaying of expectations at McLaren, with the car just performing better in certain areas and the race playing out more smoothly than in the Sprint.

“We were just quicker than we thought,” he said. “The limitations, the places we expected to struggle, probably a lot more, we didn't struggle as much in. So these longer corners, like Turn 1, have always been a big weakness for us. Part of Turn 1 was probably better than we're expecting and the second part was probably as we were expecting.

“So it's just we're still learning about the car. It's as simple as that. This track is very different. The tarmac is quite odd. Maybe that played into our hands a bit more than we were thinking, maybe with the old tarmac, we would have struggled a bit more. So just little things. We're not making it up. We're giving our honest opinion on where we want to be.

“I think if we were to go into a weekend, and we knew we're going to be strong, we've said it. So more often than not, we don't feel that optimistic, because all year we’ve been behind Red Bull, all year we've been behind Ferrari, there's no reason for us to suddenly think we should be ahead. 

“Nothing really pointed to us having an amazing race today, especially the Sprint race yesterday, which was our best kind of version of events of what can go down. But things just went to plan and kind of went very smoothly from that point onwards.

“I didn't make a mistake in Turn 1 and go off, that’s a good start! Got past the Aston and then you can just control the race. And that was very different to yesterday.”