Lando Norris implores McLaren to 'attack' areas of weakness

Lando Norris has urged McLaren to direct its development efforts towards the MCL40's slow-speed deficiencies, warning that a failure to do so will make for "a very tough end of the season" as he bids to close the 83-point deficit to Kimi Antonelli.

The reigning F1 drivers' champion dominated the Dutch Grand Prix to claim back-to-back victories, pulling over 11 seconds clear of the Mercedes driver to record his 13th career win.

It was a performance that underlined Norris' strong form this season, even as McLaren's difficult start to the campaign, blighted by reliability failures, left him playing catch-up.

Yet even in the afterglow of another commanding weekend at Zandvoort, Norris was emphatic that the MCL40 is not yet good enough to sustain a title challenge, making it clear that the underlying slow-speed weakness remains.

"A little bit," Norris replied to media, including RacingNews365, when asked if McLaren needs a targeted upgrade to address the remaining weaknesses of the MCL40.

"We still struggled in the final sector. It was still our weakest part of the track compared to them. So certainly, the slow speed is still our biggest weakness, especially just this tight, twisty stuff.

"The kind of more flowing corners, we're not so bad at. There's still some slow speed in Budapest, but the fact it's a little bit more open and flowing, but still slow speed, things were better there.

"But as soon as it kind of gets proper tight and twisty, this is when the car doesn't like it. So of course there's a mixture of both. We have to understand what I can do behind the wheel to optimise things, what we can do with setup, short-term upgrades."

McLaren has already delivered significant upgrades this season — most recently in Budapest with more added at Zandvoort, too — and Norris acknowledged that the next batch may not arrive imminently.

"We just had a lot of our big stuff, so we're probably going to have to wait a little while for other things," the British driver said.

"There needs to be a bit of a focus, I believe, on more certain areas. I think a lot of our upgrades we brought lately have just, I mean, they've elevated the whole package in pretty much every single sense.

"But it's clear where our weaknesses are and, yep, therefore we need to attack those things. And until we do that, it's still going to be a very tough end of the season."