RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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F1 Correspondent at the Hungaroring Published 1 hour ago Lando Norris ended the first half of the Formula 1 season with a victory in the Hungarian Grand Prix that he described as "one of my best performances".
It was a drive that had been a long time coming, after a difficult start to the season for the reigning world champion and his McLaren team.
But when McLaren finally gave him a car of the performance level he had become used to in the past season and a half, he more than made the most of it.
While Ferrari, the pre-race favourites, floundered and made, in the words of their team boss Frederic Vasseur "too many mistakes", Norris and McLaren were almost perfect.
Even in the context of Kimi Antonelli's stellar start to the season for Mercedes, this was one of the most impressive and convincing victories of the season.
Norris' one mistake was on the first lap. He converted his pole position into a lead at the first corner, only to misjudge the grip available at Turn Two, slide wide, and gift his position to team-mate Oscar Piastri.
It looked to have been a potentially fatal error to his victory hopes on a track where overtaking is all but impossible between evenly matched cars on similar strategies, but Norris stayed calm.
Seeing he could easily keep pace with Piastri despite being in the dirty air, he said he always believed the win was on.
"It wasn't my finest Turn Two," Norris said, "but after that, seeing what my pace was like and I was just better in every sense, in terms of degradation and pace, I was convinced I could still win the race."
Trapped, Norris begged for a different strategy to give himself a chance of victory, and eventually circumstances presented it to him.
Around half-distance. McLaren pitted Piastri to cover off Lewis Hamilton's Ferrari, which had just stopped for fresh tyres. That gave Norris clean air and he set a blistering pace.
Piastri might still have held the lead, but for a collision with Carlos Sainz as he lapped his Williams. The Australian was angry after Norris came out ahead from his stop a few laps later - but at the Spaniard, not McLaren.
"The fact I could keep up with Oscar on this kind of track, where it's impossible to follow and impossible to overtake, I was within 0.8 seconds or something for, I don't know, almost 40 laps, the fact I could do this is what gave me confidence that I'd win the race no matter what, whether he boxed early or late or whatever," Norris said.
"The pace advantage I had was huge today. But I don't know why. The cars are identical, and I've just been feeling very strong lately.
"I've worked on many areas from last year. I feel much more confident lately with how to extract performance, and I've worked a lot with my engineers to understand this car because it's certainly not an easy car to understand and figure out how to drive on the limit consistently.
"So, why? Just hard work. Hard work from my engineers and from myself to improve me as a driver and improve my driving. That is the answer."
Norris wins his first grand prix of year in Hungary
Last year, he was struggling for feeling from the McLaren.
Like all his rivals, he does not like this new generation of cars as much as the last - especially their engines and the need for so much energy management, and the way they have compromised the driving experience.
But he has gelled with them, while Piastri - so strong in the first half of last season - is struggling.
Team principal Andrea Stella says this is a continuation of the trajectory Norris has been on since a lot of self-assessment led to his strong second half of last year, and eventually the title.
"Lando is much more confident. He's much more aware of his tools that he has in his driving, how to deploy these tools. And I think he's also, let me say, more in control of his emotions," Stella said.
"Because today, when he was behind Oscar, he said a couple of times that he had pace in hand, but he didn't get overly frustrated. And the fact that he wasn't overly frustrated, I think, then allowed him to use the pace at the right time and lead him to the victory. We've seen a great trajectory of development for Lando."
This performance came after a major upgrade to the McLaren car, and there is another to come at the next race, the Dutch Grand Prix after F1's four-week summer break.
Norris' win moves him up to 98 points behind Antonelli, but he cautioned against expectations of a charge up to the top of the championship of the kind Max Verstappen and Red Bull mounted against him and McLaren last year.
"I'm just happy with today," Norris said. "It doesn't mean if I'm quick here, we're going to be quick everywhere.
"One thing I've learned for sure is just to have no expectations of the future and just to work in the present. I think that's the way we've been doing everything as a team.
"That's why we're back on top today: just working hard on ourselves as individuals and also as a team.
"Of course, I'm optimistic for the future and I think we can win more races, but we have good competition and there are still plenty of races I'm not confident in because the car is not to the standard that it needs to be in certain areas."
During the race, it appeared as if Piastri's anger over the radio might have been partly directed at the off-set strategy that led to Norris passing him for the lead.
In fact, he was instead furious with Sainz.
"The timing of my stop was fine," he said. "We wanted to cover off Hamilton, which was perfectly normal. Without getting crashed into, I would have been ahead of Lando still.
"In the moment, I was incredibly annoyed. In fact, annoyed is not the word I would use, but there was a multitude that I would, with Carlos. And, yeah, then obviously, when Lando came out ahead, I knew I had no pace to go and attack him.
"I knew my chances of winning the race were done from there."
Discussing the collision with Sainz, Piastri added: "I don't really care if he didn't see m...
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