23/10/2021
NEWS STORY
Refreshing honesty from Lando Norris as he takes the blame for COTA struggle.
While telemetry allows a driver's engineers to know each and every single move he makes, down to the tiniest detail and sometimes before he makes it, such detailed information is rarely shared with the media.
This means that drivers can sometimes pull the wool over the eyes of the media following a particularly hard day 'at the office'.
No such issues for Lando Norris however, who, on being asked if his numerous lock-ups were down to the (still) bumpy track surface at COTA, admitted: "That was just me being an idiot, braking on the kerb, which you just never do.
"Rule number one is don't brake on a kerb," he added with a grin, "so it was just me being stupid.
"It's not slippery," he insisted, " it's just the kerb is a kerb, so it's grated.
"It was like a good day in terms of result and pace, but not like easy to achieve that,” he admitted. "It's difficult just because of the wind and the bumps and the conditions. It just makes it very tricky out there.
"The first couple of runs I struggled quite a bit, but then the final run I made some changes and I was much happier with the car so I could push on it more and then the lap time came easier.
"So I think we're in a good place," he added. "I feel like we can quite easily make some changes into tomorrow to give myself some more confidence, and confidence is lap time a lot of the time.
"There's just a lot of degradation but you can still be fast. Everyone is struggling with a similar thing just because of the temperature and the track surface and so on.
"It's not easy," he insisted. "You kind of want to do the same lap times all the time, and when you see you're slowly degging off it doesn't feel good. But sometimes that's just the way it is. So it's interesting, and probably going to make for a good race on Sunday."