Norris: I don’t think we were third fastest

Lando Norris finished 3rd in the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix, but admitted he did not expect such a high result. His Australian team-mate, Daniel Ricciardo, finished in last place as his car was damaged in an incident just after the start of the race.

Lando Norris (3rd): “I saw the yellow flags, knowing that Sergio Perez and Charles Leclerc were ahead of me. Not that I hoped any of them would have any problems, but I wouldn’t mind if they did.

Actually a 4th place would have been a great result and gave us more points than we hoped for before the start of the weekend, I can say that for sure. But the race was still difficult, as George Russell was only a few seconds behind me for a long time, and I had to save the tires, as the section on the Medium rubber turned out to be very long.

Since it was quite difficult for me yesterday to do 20 laps on soft tires, I didn’t think we would last longer than 40 laps. In general, today everything was decided by a good start.

But most importantly, I have already found a common language with this machine. If you remember the problems we had in Bahrain, it’s all the more pleasant to see progress, the efforts of the team are paying off. To be fair, technical innovations are not large-scale and it is not thanks to them that we climbed to 3rd place. I don’t think our car was third fastest today and second only to Red Bull and Ferrari. Alfa Romeo, for example, also had a very fast car.

Overall, I don’t think we got 3rd thanks to the car. Rather, it became possible thanks to the well-coordinated work of the whole team on all days of the weekend, excellent pit stops, good tactics, the right approach to rubber. In general, there were a lot of things that are not always visible from the outside, but this all helped us climb the podium.”

Daniel Riccardo (18th): “Of course this is one of the worst scenarios, if you have an accident at the start, your car gets damaged and you roll back to the tail of the pack. After that you still continue the race, although you don’t have enough speed – but this doesn’t mean I would want to be in Carlos Sainz’s place.

While I understand this doesn’t sound important, sometimes it’s easier to get out of the race, and I can also be understood: I was the last, we were just slow, although we tried to gather some useful information. Now we need to check how much the car was damaged and how it affected the speed.

At the beginning I only remember that there was contact and when the safety car pulled onto the track I felt that the car was damaged, but these were already consequences.

In that episode, this happened: I drove over the curb and realized it was very busy on the track, and at some point everything would end in contact. I tried to do something to get more space, but the car started to slide and I bumped into Carlos’ Ferrari.

We have to analyze everything to understand whether it was possible to act differently in some way, but this is a difficult situation. You try not to go into the first corner too fast, to be extra careful, but someone could bump into you, you could be squeezed between other cars.

When I went into the first corner it seemed to me that everything was under control, although it is now clear that it was not. But I go to Carlos and apologize to him. If you have ruined the day not only for yourself, but also for someone else, it will not make you happy. Overall, it was one of those days…”