Lando Norris is happy with how the season has started for McLaren, and he is feeling positive and excited about the rest of the year because he’s sure the team still has a lot of room for improvement.
McLaren proved to be right behind Ferrari and Red Bull in terms of performance in the first three races. Both Norris and Oscar Piastri outperformed the only Red Bull remaining in Melbourne, showing that the gap to the top is not impossible to fill.
Max Verstappen retired, and Sergio Perez had issues due to a tear-off being stuck underneath his car, but Norris was also very close to beating Charles Leclerc for second place. This was a positive performance for the team, and the Britton knows McLaren can improve.
“On the whole, I’m very happy. Can I be happier? Yes. Can we all? Yes, because we always want more, we always want to be able to compete a bit higher.
“But I think for us to start the season in such a solid position, knowing that we can still improve on so many areas, it’s a smile on my face, because we’re in a good position, and we know we can get a lot better still.
“If you think back to 12 months ago, it was still a very, very different situation to be in. We’ve out-developed our competitors since this time last year by a huge step. It gets harder and harder to do that the closer you get to the top, but still plenty of things for us to do.
“So I’m happy with the step we made as a team. And I’m very happy at the work ethic and the effort everyone’s putting into trying to continue.”
Norris continued by underlining how he is not surprised to see Red Bull still ahead, and he also added that Ferrari made the most impressive step. However, he is happy to see McLaren is not too far behind.
“The gap to Red Bull is completely expected,” he said. “If you look at when they stopped developing last year, they put a lot of time and effort into trying to develop a good car for this year. So for us to be still as close as we are to them, I think it’s a good sign.
“You would probably say the most impressive has been Ferrari, in how they’ve been able to take a very big step, I would say, probably one of the biggest steps from last year to this year. But for us to still be not far behind, I think it’s a completely good sign for us.
“Of course, we always hope for that little bit more, and we hoped to just come out and be able to fight straight away at the front, but we took a step, and we weren’t able to maybe tackle a few of the things that we really have struggled to tackle in the last few years. But now more than ever we’re trying to tackle those areas.”