Lando Norris told he needs to ‘iron out' mistakes if he wants F1 title

Nico Rosberg says Lando Norris must “iron out” errors if he wants to win the F1 world championship.

Norris claimed a dominant victory at the Singapore Grand Prix to take a further chunk out of Max Verstappen’s advantage in the championship. The gap between the title rivals is now down to 52 points with six races - and 180 points - remaining.

While Norris finally ended his streak of losing the lead of the opening lap of F1 races as he converted pole position into a commanding third win of the season, he also survived two brushes with the barriers.

2016 world champion Rosberg described these mistakes as “very strange” and insists the McLaren driver must cut such errors out if he is to have any chance of beating Verstappen to the crown.

“I think when everybody is repeating, ‘Lando, seven times you’ve started on pole, and seven times you come out of the first lap not first, what are you doing wrong and are you worried that you are going to get it wrong again tomorrow’,” Rosberg said on the Sky Sports F1 podcast.

“It ends up adding a lot of pressure, because you really start to be like ‘wow, am I not even able to do a good start and am I going to mess it up again tomorrow? Is everybody going to keep telling me oh it’s your eighth time… That does add a lot of pressure. I think he was under pressure, especially at the start. Again he just delivered awesomely.

“Where then it went very strange was the mistakes that he was doing in the race. That baffled me a little bit what was going on there, because he hit the wall twice. Both were like really severe, almost race-ending moments, where he was quite lucky not to DNF.

“Once he went miles off the track at a hairpin, not a small outbraking, like a massive outbraking, and the other time he hit the same wall that George Russell hit last year when he went crashing out on the last lap.

“He went off the track again when he was passing a backmarker, which was the Williams, he went off the track again. So there were three moments here. That’s so strange.

“I can’t remember myself, or a Max Verstappen, or a Lewis [Hamilton], when leading so comfortably making three major mistakes. That was a bit strange. I know Singapore is so hard, concentrating, physically it was so, so tough. I don’t know what it’s down to.

“But we know from Lando that he tends to make those little errors all the time, everywhere. We’ve seen that from him, and he needs to iron that out if he wants to fight for the championship this year.”