“They’re clearly another step ahead of us”: Lando Norris believes McLaren haven't quite reached the level of F1 rivals

Lando Norris feels that McLaren are much behind Mercedes in terms of competitiveness despite the challenge the former has posed in recent races.

Norris feels that the team is a step ahead of them, and it will be some time until they chase them in all of the races.

"I’m happy that we’ve had some good weekends, but we’re not where we need to be. We’re not racing with Mercedes – they’re clearly another step ahead of us still," the 23-year-old Brit said (via RacingNews365).

Lando Norris had been strong enough from Austria, keeping the pace up in Silverstone and the following race in Hungary, to an extent. However, the Belgian Grand Prix earlier saw him drop back on the grid. Although his teammate, Oscar Piastri, was somewhat ahead of him, a first-lap incident saw him retiring.

While Norris kept dropping back, he made up places till P7 and brought in some points for the team, it was much different from how the team had performed in earlier races.

Bringing in two consecutive P2 finishes in Silverstone and Budapest was good enough for the team. Although they are extending their lead over Alpine, Norris feels that competing with Mercedes is still a far affair.

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Lando Norris reveals downforce setting which hampered the Belgian Grand Prix

McLaren's performance at the Belgian GP was quite different from their recent showcases. Even though Lewis Hamilton was able to battle till P4, Lando Norris remained out of the picture at the top for most of the time.

Norris recently revealed that the performance of the car dropped because of the setup that was changed. Apparently, it was the wings of the car which caused the car to create the wrong amount of downforce and made it hard for him to compete in the race.

"I don’t think we had optimal wing settings," Lando Norris said. "We just haven’t been able to focus on what we wanted to because we brought a whole new car, and all of the focus was on doing that, which is the correct thing to do, because there’s only three or four races which are probably as low downforce as this."

The entire Grand Prix weekend had mixed weather conditions and the perfect tuning for the cars was hard to find for the drivers because no dry runs were possible before the race.