McLaren’s Lando Norris has said he isn’t “desperate” for a win from pole position in Sunday’s Dutch Grand Prix amid his outside chance at the Formula 1 Drivers’ title.
Norris paced the field during Saturday’s qualifying session, beating Max Verstappen by over three-tenths of a second to claim pole.
Still, despite picking up his maiden win at Miami in May and being a contender for more victories since, a second win has alluded Norris.
The Briton trails Verstappen by 78 points in the Drivers’ standing, making Norris the Dutchman’s closest challenger but that has no bearing on how he’s approaching the race.
“I want to win, but I’m not desperate,” the McLaren driver said.
“I want to win. I’m working hard to win. We all do as a team. All of us here want to win, but not desperate, because desperation doesn’t succeed to anything. So it makes no difference.
“I’m trying very hard. I had places to work on over the winter. I worked hard over the summer. I’ve worked hard on them.
“Little bits are paying off already, but tomorrow is obviously the biggest place of it all to show. So working hard for a win, but not desperate.”
One of the factors plaguing Norris’ ability to claim his second GP victory has been a series of poor starts.
Pole positions in Spain and Hungary resulted in the McLaren driver being pipped at lights out, but he’s not overly concerned with the issue occurring again at Zandvoort.
“I know my starts have not been my forte over the last probably… They’ve not been bad, honestly, I’m still up there with being one of the best average starters,” Norris said.
“I’ve just missed out on a couple of races and maybe slightly worse than what it’s been over the course of a season.
“There’s a couple of times when they’ve not been quite where they need to be have been a couple of times I’ve been on the front row.
“So like I said, they’ve not been for any certain reason. They’ve been different things each time.
“But I feel confident I put in a good amount of work to kind of try and make my starts a bit better.”
McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella also spoke on Norris’ lights-out struggles and was keen to stress that it isn’t as big an issue as one might think.
“When I looked at Barcelona and I looked at Hungary, if you look at the onboard of Lando in Hungary in corner one, he makes a bit of a miracle, trying not to hit Oscar [Piastri] and hit Verstappen on the outside,” Stella explained.
“So I don’t think he could have done much better than that, without taking serious risks to have a collision.
“And in a similar way, this happened in Barcelona and also in Barcelona, I have to say that in a track in which pace is so important, you can overtake, you can regain positions, but sometimes you just have to give up a little bit from a risk-attitude point of view, because the race will come to you later.
“The problem in Barcelona is that it proved to be difficult to overtake the Mercedes, and then we lost quite a lot of time to Verstappen.
“So I personally could not find much room to improve in what I saw was the approach to corner one, without taking risks that myself I would have judged [as] too much risk, in my conversation with the drivers.
“So I’d rather stay in the race, I’d rather see if we can recover positions, if the situation is one where if you try too hard, you may be out of the race at lap one.
“When you have this kind of pace, this kind of performance, you want to get to the chequered flag.”
