Lando Norris has explained what he must to do "come back strong" in the second half of the F1 season. The 24-year-old feels he is "paying the price" for "trying a bit too hard" recently, something he believes has cost him a "good amount" of points as he looks to battle Max Verstappen for the drivers' championship. More realistically, McLaren's best chance of a title will most likely come from the constructors' fight, where the Woking team has whittled down Red Bull's advantage from 115 points after the Chinese Grand Prix to just 42 as F1 heads into the summer break. On the current trajectory, McLaren will beat the Milton Keynes-based outfit to the crown. However, Norris feels he has left points on the table of late because of "stupid" mistakes , despite what appears to be a strong run of results for the team. "There are many different things, it's just different stuff," he told media including RacingNews365 when asked as to the cause of the errors. "Obviously, my starts have not been great. I've probably lost a good amount of points off the line." That was again evident in Sunday's Belgian GP when Norris made an error through Turn 1 that dropped him a few places and cost him "easily a podium or even more". He added: "There isn't one reason, I'm just trying a bit too hard and paying a price for that."
Norris has 'not been on it'
There is a developing narrative around Norris' race starts, particularly when launching from pole position, which he has done five times in his F1 career. Of those five pole-sitting occasions, he has never been race leader by the end of lap one, the most recent of which was this season's Hungarian Grand Prix, a race he likely would have won had he been better off the line. Another difficult start at Spa-Francorchamps saw him pushed wide and onto the gravel on the exit of the first corner, which resulted in him being shuffled down the order from fourth to seventh. Norris, however, is maintaining positivity, insisting that despite things not clicking of late, he is "happy" with where he and McLaren are as he plans how to "come back strong" after the summer shutdown. "Just forget about it," was his response to being questioned on how he resets now, with the summer break looming. "We've still got another week of debriefs and stuff, so I'm in the factory for half of the week, just to kind of review everything, make sure we take a break on a good note, which I think we have, honestly. "I feel there are a lot of positives. Yes, just things haven't clicked for us, but I feel we have still got what we need and what we want. "So, I'm happy. We've got what it takes to fight and to put up a good battle, but I've just not been on it from my side, so review my things, go away and forget about it for a good time and then come back strong."
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