McLaren benefited from not setting their expectations too high ahead of the 2019 season, says Lando Norris.

The team has achieved its highest finishing position in the constructors’ championship for seven years. Norris said the team’s “fresh start” with two new drivers and several new appointments in the management team made it important they did not “over-hype” its potential.

“[There were] a lot of changes within the team which kind of refreshed everything. But at the same time, because the last years have been so bad, I don’t think coming into this year – for good reason – we overhyped as many things as in previous years.

“Always coming into Abu Dhabi everyone was so excited about how McLaren were going to do the next year because as a team we said too many things which were making people overly confident. We didn’t do that, which was a good thing.”

In 2018 the team scored its best result at the first race of the season, then struggled as the year went on. Norris has seen gradual improvement at McLaren during 2019.

“People worked hard over the winter. We then started testing and we weren’t super-happy with how testing went, but then as the race weekends went on, then the environment and everything started coming together more and more.

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“I think there has been a lot of key things but [having] two new drivers, new management, new people looking after everyone, I think just putting everything together has made it all more enjoyable for the drivers, but also more enjoyable for the team.”

The biggest area the team need to improve for next year is “downforce”, said Norris. “It’s as simple as that. Downforce is always the biggest thing and it’s one of the things that has improved so much from last year.

“It’s not just having more downforce, but the efficiency characteristics of the car. The car still needs to work in different conditions, different winds, different cornering types, different speeds.”

But McLaren can also improve in other areas, he added. “There’s still things from our side like the pit stops, with driving that we need to improve. Our efficiency, how we work as a team, but also with the car.

“The cars suits some tracks a lot and some tracks not at all. And it’s trying to make the car suit ideally both, but maybe not so much one track, but also be more competitive in the tracks we suffered in a lot more. The characteristics of how the car works and so on is the biggest place to to improve.”

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2019 F1 season