Lando Norris set for McLaren talks after being left ‘surprised’ at

Lando Norris has discussed plans to hold talks with McLaren following an unexpected pit strategy during the challenging Japanese Grand Prix. The British driver, who had high hopes of securing consecutive podiums after qualifying third on the grid for Sunday’s race, was unable to fend off the advancing Ferraris.

Carlos Sainz, who began the race alongside Norris on the second row, secured third place behind the two Red Bull drivers. Meanwhile, Ferrari executed a perfect strategy for Charles Leclerc, enabling him to climb from eighth on the grid to a fourth-place finish.

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.”

Norris also expressed his surprise at the team’s strategy, saying: “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.