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2024 FIA Formula One World Championship
2024 Chinese Grand Prix
Shanghai International Circuit
Shanghai, China
Sunday, 21 April 2024
McLaren's Lando Norris is hoping the team can come up with a better strategy for the
Chinese Grand Prix on Sunday, April 21 after he missed out on the podium in Suzuka.
The Brit had secured his first podium of the season when he finished third in the Australian Grand Prix and was optimistic about repeating the feat in the Japanese Grand Prix.
However, Norris wasn't able to match the pace of the two Ferraris and came in 3.178 seconds behind Charles Leclerc in P5, with the Monegasque benefitting from one-stop pit strategy.
Carlos Sainz Jr. finished 5.655 seconds ahead of his team-mate in P3 and is 18 points ahead of Norris in the drivers' standings in fourth place.
The 24-year-old driver expressed surprise at being called into the pits at lap 12 and felt McLaren could have adopted a different strategy after he qualified third on the grid.
"It was a tough race - I think compared to those guys who had better pace, compared to the Ferraris, just not enough," Norris said. "I think everything kind of fell back in-line in terms of Red Bull, Ferrari [then] us, which is a shame.
"It doesn't feel great when you start third and just kind of go backwards and kind of feel like you're just fighting a bit of a losing battle against these guys because they can just do a lot more.
"They can go longer and extend to have a much bigger tyre delta. It's hard to fight on a track like this, but we gave it a good shot, we did what we could have done. We've got the maximum points apart from these top two teams, which was all we could do.
"Charles did a good job to go that far on one set of tyres and then I'm kind of surprised we boxed as early as we did to be honest with you, because that just put it in line with what Ferrari did, and we covered George [Russell] which I just didn't think we maybe needed to do.
"This is something we'll discuss during the briefing. Maybe a discussion of we could have done a better job for P4. It's always difficult to make those decisions at the time, we didn't even know that he was going to pit."
2024 Japanese Grand Prix results:
Winner: Max Verstappen - Red Bull Racing
Second Place: Sergio Perez - Red Bull Racing
Third Place: Carlos Sainz Jr. - Ferrari
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