Circuit Paul Ricard, Sunday 24 July

Hear from McLaren Formula 1 drivers Lando Norris and Daniel Ricciardo, and Team Principal Andreas Seidl after the French Grand Prix.

As it happened

• Both cars got away cleanly, however Lando dropped two positions while Daniel gained one on the opening lap of the race
• On lap 8 Daniel dropped back to P9, overtaken by Ocon
• Sainz, moving through the field after starting P19, overtook Daniel for P9
• The Safety Car was deployed on lap 18 after Leclerc made a mistake forcing him off the track. Lando and Daniel both pitted for Hard tyres and resumed in P7 and P8
• Daniel defended well against Ocon after dropping more than a second behind Lando and out of the DRS zone
• Sainz pitted for fresh tyres giving Lando and Daniel P6 and P7 before the Spaniard overtook both cars within three laps
• Daniel was overtaken by Ocon on lap 46
• Zhou was forced to retire which led to a Virtual Safety Car but the car was cleared too quickly for anybody to pit
• Lando finished in P7 while Daniel came home in P9

Started	5th
Finished	7th
Fastest lap	1m39.037s on lap 43 (+3.255s, 11th)
Pit-stops	1, lap 18 [Medium/Hard] (3.7s)

"Tough day but I think it was what we expected. It was a long race and we struggled a little bit with the degradation of the tyre but also just with the pure pace. We weren’t as quick as we needed to be, so yeah, just tough but I won’t say disappointed. It’s sort of what we were expecting, so not a surprise. The upgrades did bring performance and we will work over the next event to make sure they’re fully optimised. We’ll keep pushing, keep trying to improve, and we’ll go again next weekend. Thanks again to all the team here and at the factory for their efforts."

Started	9th
Finished	9th
Fastest lap	1m39.133s on lap 27 (+3.352s, 14th)
Pit-stops	1, lap 18 [Medium/Hard] (2.6s)

"It’s points so that’s a positive. It’s only ninth but still important. I had a bit of pace early in the stint and tried to get more out of it, but then it fell away a little too quickly so I definitely struggled from mid-stint onwards and didn’t have the pace to run with the Alpines and Lando. I felt like I did the best that I could – but it’s not enough to make me happy. Thanks again to everyone for the hard work in getting the upgrades to track this weekend and we'll push to get more out of them over the next few races. Double points but we’ll keep working."

"P7 and P9 maximised what we had in our hands today. Alpine were a little quicker over a race distance but Lando and Daniel both drove very good races and we go away from Le Castellet with a lot of positives. The upgrade package we introduced here gave us a step forward in terms of performance. Big thank you to the development and production teams back at the factory for providing us with enough parts to run the upgrade on both cars, and also to the trackside team and our colleagues at Mercedes HPP who worked very hard in tough conditions to ensure we could get both cars home and in the points. 

"We have a lot of data to analyse within the next few days, to see how we can extract more performance from our updated MCL36, before we get back on track, five days from now at the Hungaroring. One more big effort before the summer break."

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