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Lando Norris

Norris wanted to pass Verstappen in Monaco GP closing stages

The McLaren driver believes he would have been able to un-lap himself in the closing stages, due to his superior pace on the Intermediate tyres.

Norris Monaco
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Lando Norris wanted to overtake Max Verstappen and un-lap himself in the closing stages of the Monaco Grand Prix.

Rain hit the track midway through the Grand Prix and caused a lot of activity in the pit lane, as drivers scrambled to switch to Intermediate tyres to combat the changing conditions.

Norris was one of the quickest drivers on the Intermediates towards the end of the race, and joked that he wanted to un-lap himself on Verstappen having been overtaken while running P9.

"I'd say I was the quickest on track, even quicker than Max. I wanted Max to get blue flags," he told Sky Sports.

"Probably for the first time in his life he would have had blue flags, which would have been amazing.

"So I was really hoping to pass him just because he would have hated it, and I would have loved it and would have just been funny. But he was leading Monaco Grand Prix, so I also didn't really want to intrude too much."

Norris: Mistake to make two stops

Many of the teams were given information that the rain would be brief, which is why they chose to pit for dry tyres initially instead of the Intermediates.

Norris felt that it was a mistake to pit on the lap that they did, believing that it would have made more sense to stay out for an extra couple of laps to assess the conditions.

"The pace was actually very strong. Quickest on track and then I think the only mistake was we boxed onto the Hard tyre in the middle for two laps and then we went on to the Intermediate," he explained.

"We just didn't expect it to rain, or the team told me it wasn't going to rain a lot, they said it was going to be very brief and only a little bit.

"Then I was of course happy to box with the information I had, but probably should have just waited a couple more laps just to see what did happen. We lost at least 30 seconds, which would have put us up to three positions."

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