'I don't care at the minute' - Lando Norris rejects “stupid" F1 title talk

Lando Norris says it would be “pretty stupid” to think about winning this year’s F1 world championship despite his dominant victory at the Dutch Grand Prix.

The McLaren driver fought back from losing the lead due to a poor start to overtake Red Bull’s Max Verstappen on Lap 18. Norris eased clear of Verstappen and sealed a statement win at Zandvoort by 22.9 seconds.

Norris’s second victory of the season saw him cut Verstappen’s advantage in the drivers’ world championship, though the Dutchman still has a huge 70-point buffer.

And Norris is refusing to get carried away with the idea that he still has a shot of beating Verstappen to the world title with nine races remaining.

"I've been fighting for the championship since the first race of the year. There's no sudden decision now,” Norris.

"I need to do better. I've been working hard the whole year and I'm still 70 points behind Max. So it's pretty stupid to think of anything at the minute.

"I just take one race at a time and just keep doing what I'm doing now because there's no point in thinking ahead and thinking of the rest.

"I don't care about it at the minute. I'm just... yeah, focused on one race at a time, so it's not a question that I need to get asked every single weekend.”

McLaren’s formidable performance followed the introduction of the team’s first proper upgrade since the Miami Grand Prix in May.

But Norris, who also stormed to pole position by a margin of 0.356s in qualifying, insisted McLaren’s victory was not solely down to their updates.

“I still feel like we would have won without the upgrades this weekend,” he said. “The upgrades didn’t make us suddenly a lot quicker here.

“The upgrades we’ve been putting on the car, they helped us every time. It’s not like we put it on and questioned it. We put it on and it just did everything we wanted it to do and needed it to do, and what it was meant to do.

“We’ve taken our time. This was our first upgrade since Miami. Yes we’ve had little bits along the way. Just like tweaks, it’s nothing like here’s performance. And a lot of people have.

“So we kind of fell down a little bit in the order in terms of delivering parts and delivering upgrades comparing to all of our competition. This was our first time that we really put something on the car to drive us a step forward. It definitely did that.”

Norris went on to downplay suggestions that McLaren could be the team to beat at next weekend’s Italian Grand Prix.

"Anyone could be on top," he stated. "Ferrari, Mercedes, Red Bull, us. Ferrari was quite quick. We probably didn't expect them to be as good as they were. Maybe Red Bull struggled a bit more.

"I think that was probably more the factor that the Red Bull struggled a bit more than we were expecting. We just keep our heads down.

"There's no point thinking how we're going to do next weekend. We'll just get there and work hard and wait till we get there. There's no point thinking ahead."