Lando Norris says he made the most progress last season in the races and decisions he made on the track which was his weakness in his 2019 F1 debut season, ahead of Daniel Ricciard’s arrival at McLaren this season.
Norris finished behind the more experienced Sainz in both seasons even though they were extremely close in qualifying and in 2020 he finished eighth in the drivers ’standings, two places behind his teammate, with a podium in the first race of the season in Austria.
The young British driver recently announced that he contracted the coronavirus during a holiday in Abu Dhabi, ahead of the start of pre-season preparations with McLaren, and looked back on his second F1 season in which he improved his racing skills.
“The race is one of the areas I worked on the most during the winter because I realized it was one of my bigger weaknesses,” said Norris.
“It’s something I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing the details because there are a lot of things that can happen in a race that together make a good race.”
“So I focused a lot on the race and I was definitely a lot stronger in that last year, but there are still areas where I can improve and keep getting better.”
“So with a lot more confidence I can say that I did a much better job in the races, getting more out of the car to be in the positions I was in.”
“Because I could very easily not be fourth at the Bahrain GP and I could easily crash at the start and drop out of the race early.”
“I make better decisions, touch wood. And those decisions paid off and allowed me to achieve much better results.”
Norris secured a positive qualifying ratio against Sainz (9:8) after posting fourth qualifying time in the last race of the season in Abu Dhabi and gavc McLaren the smallest gap behind the pole position in 2020 (0.251 seconds).
