Norris says McLaren still needs to step up its game

While McLaren's impressive progress this year has allowed it to open up a 21-points advantage over its closest rivals Renault, Norris says a particular weakness its car has in low-speed corners is something that especially needs to be sorted.

"I think we need to work quite a bit from Silverstone, as I don't think we were that strong altogether compared to Renault at least," explained the British rookie.

"So it's not just carrying on - we need to build up from it, I think they took a good step forward. We have things to work on. It's not the result that I would have wanted for myself but as a team we still got a good amount of points."

Norris says that McLaren's strengths in high speed has helped it overcome its deficit in slow speed at recent tracks, but knows that it cannot rely on all layouts suiting it.

"[At Silverstone] we were better through Maggotts and Becketts and they [Renault] couldn't catch up down the straights and in slow speed they were all over us," he said.

"Slow speed is our biggest weakness at the moment. It has been said before, and it is something that we have to work on. But it is not as easy as it looks nor easy to change things and so on.

"It is what we are trying to focus on, but we need to keep the high speed and medium speed [advantage] – and actually improve it because compared to the top three teams we are still a long way off.

"Compared to the teams we are realistically racing now, we have strengths and weaknesses and are working on the weaknesses."

Asked if the slow speed issue could be sorted quickly or was more a long term project, Norris said: "It is not something we can change over a weekend. It is not like we can optimise the car for the slow speed and sacrifice the high speed, even doing that you cannot gain what we are losing at the moment.

"It is part of the longer term project and part of the things we need to improve and hopefully something we can improve mostly over the winter."