“I Let Down the Team”- Lando Norris Explains His “Proper Mistake” During the Hungarian Grand Prix

After an excellent couple of races in Austria, McLaren suffered a poor run at the Hungarian Grand Prix. Carlos Sainz Jr managed to salvage 2 points with a ninth-place finish, but Lando Norris was down in 13th.

Everything boiled down to a painfully slow start for the Briton, effectively dropping him all the way down to 14th after a P8 start. However, he insisted that nothing was wrong with the car and that it was his own fault for getting bogged down.

His Hungarian GP weekend started well enough considering how he out-qualified teammate Carlos Sainz on Saturday. Unfortunately, he undid his hard work with over-opportunism in the greasy race.

He paid a heavy price for his mistake and tumbled down to P14 by turn 2, and he stayed for an extra lap on his intermediate tyres.

“I lost out at the start,” said Norris to the official F1 website. “The team did a good job… but I was the one who let down the team, in terms of probably getting the worst start I ever got in my life.

“Why was that? Because I just wanted to go forward, and when you try and go forward in the wet, you go backwards. It’s as simple as that.”

Lando Norris won’t let this get him down

Admittedly, Carlos Sainz had a better race and even beat future teammate Charles Leclerc to 10th place. Post-race penalties later elevated him to 9th.

At the end of the race, Lando Norris helped his mechanics with the car to make up for his mistake. Fortunately, he is still sitting in fourth place in the drivers’ standings despite a lacklustre performance on Sunday.

He concluded, “I think in the long run, you want to be scoring whenever you have the opportunity to. Today we did have the opportunity to get those one or two [points], which could prove quite costly come the end of the season.

“So it’s just probably the finer details. I mean, the start’s not ‘finer details’. It’s a pretty big thing, but the first two races were perfect. This one is the first one I made a proper mistake on and a big error.

“So I’m just going to work on those things, we’ll review everything from the past few weeks and try and do a better job in Silverstone.”

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