Lando Norris Fights Back to Fourth but Loses Championship Lead to Teammate
It was a very tough weekend for Lando Norris – the second difficult one in a row after Bahrain. In Saudi Arabia, the Brit, who started from tenth due to a crash in qualifying, managed to climb back to fourth place, finishing just one second behind Leclerc. A challenging race for Norris, who opted for hard tires at the start and switched to mediums toward the end, but that wasn’t enough to secure a podium finish.
Norris has now lost the championship lead to teammate Oscar Piastri, who is 10 points ahead. After the race, Lando commented: “Fourth place was the best result I could get today. Obviously, it’s really disappointing to miss out on the podium. I make life difficult for myself, especially in races like this – it would’ve been much easier if I had started further up. I need to help myself by having better Saturdays than I’ve had so far.”
He then added: “Red Bull is as quick as us in qualifying, but also in the race. Just because we’re fast in practice, people keep coming out with all this crap. We believe we’re a lot quicker than it looks. I think Max was probably the fastest today, so we’ve got work to do. People keep saying we’re the best, the fastest, but that’s only because we show strong pace in practice. We lose any advantage when it comes to qualifying. But this is just our way of working.”
And finally: “This is how we think we can optimize things. If we didn’t work this way, we’d be even further behind. I’m happy with the work we’re doing – we just need to fine-tune it. We’ve got a great car, and I’m probably the fastest on average, but clearly, that’s not enough.”
