“The car was mega. I could push, we were flying the whole race and at the end could just chill, so it was a nice race. Still tough, I’m a bit out of breath. A very fun one.”
Those “close calls” perhaps left the McLaren team’s hearts in their mouths as Norris made a couple of brushes with the walls of the Marina Bay Street Circuit. One of those incidents prompted the 24-year-old’s race engineer to remind him to apply “full concentration” and “take a drink” amid Singapore’s humid conditions.
RACE START: Watch the getaway in Singapore as Norris holds the lead while others battle it out behind
Quizzed on whether he needed to push so hard given the sizeable gap he held to Verstappen throughout the race, Norris explained: “It’s not that you’re necessarily over-pushing, sometimes it can be that you’re just chilling too much. Maybe it was a bit of both, I don’t know what it is.
“It’s tricky, it was still tough out there, easy to lock the tyres like I did. I didn’t want to have a one-second lead, I wanted to have the biggest lead possible.
