Lando Norris said a radical adjustment to his car mid-race allowed him to improve his pace and chase after the race leader.
The McLaren driver dropped back from leader Max Verstappen as the pair ran on medium rubber at the start of the race but slashed his rivals’ advantage to just seven-tenths of a second by the end of the race after both switched to the hard tyres.
Norris’ pace improved around 20 laps into his second stint shortly after he asked his team why he was coming under pressure from Charles Leclerc behind. “I was slow on the medium relative to Max,” he explained. “And I wasn’t comfortable as soon as I came out on the hard tyre.
“So I quite quickly asked, like, ‘where am I struggling?’ And they’re like, ‘oh, they’re just pushing more than you’. But I was asking because I just felt slow and I didn’t feel like I could push a lot more.
“As soon as I started to push I felt like I’d oversteer, I’d understeer, lock tyres. It was just the tyres were not in a good window. And I think it’s clear, you know, with Max saying a similar thing, that as soon as they’re not in the right window, just you can’t push. You don’t have the confidence with the car.
“So I had to just manage things as best I could. When I say I’m pushing, it doesn’t mean you’re 110%. Pushing can still be 90%. You’re just pushing to the limit of what you want to do.”
However Norris was able to find a configuration which improved his handling balance. “I basically changed all my switches on the steering wheel to try and help the rear tyres and try to kill the fronts, because I just had too much front at that point,” he said.
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“Maybe five, 10 laps later, things started to come back to me. So making all these changes and changing the differential and the brake balance and all of those things really allowed me to bring the tyres back into a good window. As soon as I got there, I felt confident enough to push and as soon as I felt like I could push, it kind of spiralled in the right direction.”
Norris said it was a “coincidence” that this happened as he was coming under pressure from Leclerc. The Ferrari driver then made a mistake at Variante Alta and dropped back.
“When Charles was behind me, I didn’t have a lot more than what I had,” said Norris. “And if I did, I probably would have made a mistake and went off track. So it was tricky.
“But as soon as Charles made the…
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