‘Two better than one’ for McLaren in fight against Red Bull

Lando Norris believes McLaren’s driver line-up is a key advantage for the team in the constructors’ championship, which is currently led by Red Bull.

He and team mate Oscar Piastri have taken 48 and 40 points respectively over the last three races. While Max Verstappen has scored 58 for Red Bull his team mate Sergio Perez has contributed just four.

Having lost significant ground to Red Bull over the opening four races, Norris admits it’s “between Ferrari and us” in the championship for second place at the moment. “We’ll keep pushing and I think that’s one of our biggest strengths at the minute,” he said. “We have two drivers as McLaren who are up there not making mistakes and getting pretty much everything out of the car every single weekend.

“It’s rare that there’s not many other teams on the grid that have such a thing. So for us, it’s more out of what we can do against Ferrari.

“We’ve been a more consistent team coming into this weekend. They’ve had some mistakes and just struggled a little bit more for whatever reason.”

However he also noted “two is going to be better than one, you know, in Max’s case.”

“So we’re doing a good job, but we still need to keep pushing on and try and bring more upgrades and things like that. Because with Mercedes joining, it’s only going to make it harder to score big points like we did today.”

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Last weekend’s race was the second in a row where Perez failed to reach Q1 and did not finish the race. Red Bull extended his contract to drive for them between the two rounds.

Verstappen said “the damage was done” before the race for Perez in Canada due to his struggles in qualifying. “Starting in the back, it’s very hard in these conditions.

“Then, of course, I saw him retire with the damage. So I knew that I had to score big, of course, to not let the other teams catch up a lot.”

However he believes the team will remain in a strong position as long as he keeps winning races, as he has done in six of the nine rounds so far.

“As long as you keep winning, so you score 25 points, even if the others finish P2, P3, you don’t really lose out too much. And then you kind of can afford sometimes these one-offs.”

Verstappen backed Perez to rebounded from his recent slump. “Naturally, we always want the two cars to be up there,” he said. “I have no doubt that will change very soon again.

“So we just…