‘We want to fight for wins’ – Lando Norris ‘not happy with a P4’ finish in Singapore Grand Prix

Lando Norris admits that he is “not happy with a P4” finish in the Singapore Grand Prix, with the reigning World Champion demanding more from McLaren as they “want to fight for wins”.

The Briton was left fifth on the grid for the 62-lap race on the streets of Marina Bay, a position he retained through the opening phase as he closely followed Kimi Antonelli’s Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari.

Norris made a mid-race pit stop for fresh tyres, jumping Antonelli and pressuring Hamilton for the final step on the podium as the Ferrari driver was on worn soft tyres.

Having failed to overtake Hamilton at Turn 1, Norris lost a position to Antonelli before eventually getting the better of Hamilton to finish fourth.

“I can look at it in two ways,” said Norris. “One, it’s not a bad result for us. I think P4 is as good as we were going to get.

“I could have done a better job to fight more for the P3, done a better job fighting against Lewis and positioning my car a bit better and not going off and allowing Kimi to come through. Otherwise, a P4 is the best we could achieve today. I’m happy we managed to do that but we want more than what we had today.”

Norris finished 16 seconds adrift of the podium but was 40s behind race winner Max Verstappen, with McLaren‘s form from the summer, where Norris claimed two victories, having been lost.

“Red Bull seem like the team to beat and have clearly improved the car a lot over the last few weeks, and we’ve just slipped to the back of the top four,” said Norris.

“We’re the fourth fastest team, which means that if we finished P4 today we still did a good job and overachieved let’s say in terms of car result.

“I’m not happy with a P4, I want a podium and we want to fight for wins. We need to keep trying to improve and bringing upgrades to make the car better.”

Team mate Oscar Piastri was able to salvage P5 at the chequered flag, having overtaken Hamilton on the penultimate lap, with the Australian having to make an unscheduled stop mid-race with a slow puncture.

“It felt pretty reasonable I would say. I think we just didn’t quite have enough pace,” said Piastri.

“We couldn’t go with Max and Charles [Leclerc], I think Kimi was a little bit quicker than us as well. There wasn’t really too much we could do other than where we ended up.”