MONTMELÓ, Spain — Just 24 hours after what he described as the best lap of his career, pole sitter Lando Norris saw the Spanish Grand Prix slip through his fingers in the opening moments of the race.
“I f—ed up the start,” a downbeat Norris would tell McLaren immediately after finishing little more than two seconds behind Formula One world championship leader Max Verstappen. Norris’ hard work from Saturday afternoon was undone in the 579-metre (633-yard) run down to Turn 1 at the Circuit de Catalunya.
Despite being aggressive off the line and forcing the eventual race winner on to the grass, Norris still found himself behind as they entered the first corner. Crucially, George Russell also found a way around both of them on the outside; while Verstappen got past Russell a few laps later, Norris would have to wait until the first round of pit stops to jump the Mercedes, a delay that served a decisive blow to his hopes of winning the race.
When asked to assess his race in the news conference after the race, Norris said his start was the only negative he could point to.
“Not good enough, simply because we should have won today,” he said. “I think we had the quickest car, but I just lost it at the start, and then I couldn’t get past George for the first stint. I think we quite easily had the best car out there today, I just didn’t do a good enough job off the line, and then that one thing cost me everything.
“From Turn 2 onwards, 10 out of 10, I don’t think I could have done much more and I think as a team, we did the perfect strategy. I was very happy with what we did, but yeah, the one part of the start, the 1 percent, wasn’t good enough.”
Spain 2024 might not be as dramatic as the other great “what might have been” moment of Norris’ career, when McLaren’s misjudgment of a late rain shower at the 2021 Russian Grand Prix cost him the win, but it will sting badly for a little while. It shouldn’t take the papaya-hued team long to get over it, though.
That’s because we now have enough evidence to suggest that Red Bull’s huge performance gap from the start of 2024 has evaporated. McLaren look like a regular challenger now — some might even suggest they’ve moved ahead — while Mercedes built on the good work of Canada with a strong third and fourth with Lewis Hamilton and Russell.
Compared to the start of the season, when Verstappen looked entirely unstoppable, the energy around F1 has been different since Norris’ maiden triumph at the Miami…
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