Norris: Aston Martin is getting slower

After Lewis Hamilton was disqualified and his second result in the US Grand Prix was annulled, Lando Norris moved up to second place in the final standings, and his points were enough for the McLaren team to take the lead from Aston Martin in the Constructors’ Championship. .

After 18 rounds in the championship, the team from Woking has 242 points and Aston Martin now has six fewer.

Lando believes that the AMR23 car is getting slower with each successive technical update, and McLaren’s next task is to overtake Ferrari in the time remaining until the end of the championship. Although that will be more difficult, because the Scuderia, which is in second place in the team rankings, still has 80 points more.

“That is our goal. I think we are in a good rhythm now,” said Norris after yesterday’s race. – It seems that Aston Martin manages to make their car slower with every new product they introduce. I mean, at the beginning of the year Red Bull was racing on the circuits with Aston Martin, but in Austin both cars of this team fell out of contention in the first part of qualifying. They had problems then too, although I don’t know why, and I don’t even know what positions they ended up in.

They used to be very strong and in the first half of the year they earned a lot of points, but then they started to have problems, and we, on the contrary, improved. If we remember how we started the season, how difficult the Bahrain Grand Prix was for us, how much time we lost to pole position, and my six pit stops during the first race, when I had problems with the power unit…

All this put us in an unfavorable position from the start, but look at the level we have reached now: we are already competing with Mercedes and Red Bull, and for almost everyone this is an impossible task.

On the one hand we are angry that we couldn’t fight for the win, on the other hand the day is still great for us considering the results we showed before and how much we have improved now. But at the same time I think we have already missed our best chance to win the race. I think we had such an opportunity in Qatar, but I didn’t take it.

However, I don’t want to say that we will no longer have the chance to claim victory, I will never say that. But until the end of the season there will be no more racing on very fast circuits such as Suzuka. There will also be songs reminiscent of Qatar, and we would perform there with confidence. But if you analyze the GPS data, you will see that our car handles slow corners poorly. That’s why I’m not particularly optimistic about the Brazilian Grand Prix; I think we will perform poorly there.”