Lando Norris believes his chances of winning the race slipped away not only due to mistakes made on track—including an early error during the rolling start and others while chasing teammate Oscar Piastri—but also because of a delayed pit stop call. According to the British driver, if the team had called him into the pits earlier, he might not only have closed the gap to Oscar Piastri but potentially overtaken him as well. However, under the circumstances, pitting first to switch to slick tires was a risky strategy considering Norris was running in second position at the time. Only Lewis Hamilton chose that bold approach and successfully gained an impressive eleven places during the race.
“I need to ask the team about it. It’s tough because you also lose quite a bit of time by staying out too long,” Norris admitted in his post-race interview. “For us, stopping in the pit lane on that particular lap was a late decision. Looking back, I think we would probably be a bit critical of ourselves for staying out so long. I believe there was enough evidence during the race that we should have pitted earlier, but no one made that call soon enough.”
Near-impossible Feats
Norris’s disappointment was clear when reflecting on how things unfolded: “It hurt more that Oscar set a perfect lap while I had to do an extra lap. That’s just how it goes sometimes.” During the interview, the British driver revealed that his race engineer, Will Joseph, decided to fit a set of hard tires instead of the medium tires that Piastri was running: “Will asked me if I wanted the hard tires, and I said yes. That was it. To be honest, I didn’t even know Oscar was on mediums. That didn’t influence my decision.”
“I thought the hard tires would perform slightly better toward the end of the race. They are a bit harder to warm up and maybe the first few laps on them would be more challenging—and I think they were. In the final laps, I had an advantage in terms of grip. But the pit stop itself wasn’t great. I was the second driver to pit and I think I lost eight or nine seconds just by being second at the pit lane. Closing that gap to Oscar from there is a huge challenge. I tried, but I wasn’t close enough,” Norris concluded at the end of the Belgian Grand Prix.
With the final race before the summer break approaching, Lando Norris will be eager to bounce back on the high-speed, technically demanding streets of Budapest—a circuit the British driver has consistently praised. Fans and the McLaren team alike will be watching closely to see how the #4 driver performs in Hungary, hoping for a strong turnaround.
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