Lando Norris says the whole McLaren F1 Team did not do a good enough job during the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season, and they should have scored more than just the one podium finish.
Norris was the only driver outside of the top three teams – Oracle Red Bull Racing, Scuderia Ferrari and the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team – to stand on the podium in 2022, the British racer doing so in the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix.
However, despite saying that a podium does mean something to both him and the team, doing it only once during the season was just not good enough.
“A podium always means something” said Norris to Motorsport.com. “It means something to me, means something to the team. But one isn’t enough.
“One is like, we got lucky, and all of this stuff. You want to feel like you deserve to be there every time and we deserved to be there for sure. We weren’t quick enough to be there. We were kind of way ahead of where we deserve to be.
“But yeah, one time isn’t enough for me. It’s not a good enough job by the whole team.”
Norris admitted that the team found the 2022 season difficult, with many downs in between the ups. After finishing third in the Constructors’ Championship standings in 2020 and fourth in 2021, they slipped another position to fifth in 2022.
There were difficulties with the MCL36 car, Norris confirmed, but he is confident that the team can engineer a better car in 2023 that will enable him to fight more regularly for the top three.
“We found it difficult,” Norris added. “We’ve been quite up and down. We’ve had a weekend like [Abu Dhabi] where we’ve been quick. And then we were in Brazil, which was one of our worst weekends of the whole season.
“We’ve had one of the biggest lows, and then maybe one of the best highs of the year in the final two weekends. So [there is] a lot of understanding still for us, a lot of learning. But we need to take a step next year, we have to take a step.
“And I feel like everyone’s putting in the effort to do so. Time will tell.”
