Norris "lost 30 seconds" pitting for slicks four laps before taking intermediates · RaceFans

29th May 2023, 17:53 | Written by Ida Wood and Claire Cottingham

Lando Norris was "pleased" to score two points with ninth place in the Monaco Grand Prix, but was otherwise unhappy with his race.

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But he fared less well in qualifying and the race. Norris came eighth in Q1 and 10th in the next two segments of qualifying, hitting the wall twice in Q2 and being held up by Leclerc in Q3.

He held 10th in the race for 49 laps before pitting to replace his medium compound tyres for hards. Four laps later he was in the pits again, this time following the rest of the field in switching to intermediate tyres due to rain, and emerged a lapped 11th.

He overtook team mate Oscar Piastri to return to tenth, then profited from a brake glazing problem for AlphaTauri's Yuki Tsunoda – who he ran behind in the first stint of the race – to move up to ninth.

Afterwards Norris said there was "not a lot" of the race to be pleased about. "The pace in the dry was pretty bad," he said to media including RaceFans. "We were pretty slow. A long way off the pace of the AlphaTauri.

"We did the extra pit stop in the middle, which also was probably just something we need to review. I obviously went with the information I was given, but maybe I should have questioned a bit more if we should have waited one or two more laps, and then seen how wet it got before going onto the hard tyre or going onto the intermediates."

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Norris’ pace on the intermediates was strong and he believes he missed out on a much better finish because of the time spent making an extra pit stop.

"We shouldn't have boxed" the first time, Norris concluded. However he admitted Tsunoda was quicker than him during the race.

"If I just look at today, the AlphaTauri was a lot quicker. With how much quicker he was today, they should have been quicker than us yesterday. I don't believe that we had a quicker car yesterday and not today," said Norris.

"So mixed feelings I guess. There's five, six teams who are a lot quicker than us – not [all] a lot, AlphaTauri may be a little bit more on par with us and a little bit quicker this weekend, but you have Alpine who were considerably ahead of where we were. I don't know.

"I wouldn't say any big positives, I wouldn't say the car was mega. I think we just did a good job of getting up to speed. Everyone takes a long time to get up to pace and that's why we looked very good in FP1, FP2. But the further into the weekend we got, the worse we got. And that's why we ended up where we did."

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