2025 world champion admits that a lack of balance makes the McLaren difficult to drive.

Like Ferrari and Red Bull, McLaren is having an up and down season, and like its rivals the Woking team doesn't understand quite why.

Though teammate Oscar Piastri finished fourth in Austria he was over 20s behind the podium finishers, while Norris was a further ten second behind in seventh, yet both are using the same engine as the race winner.

"We're a long way behind," Norris told reporters post-race. "There's a reason he is on pole by four tenths," he added, referring to George Russell, the McLaren driver stopping short of making a wisecrack about yellow flags.

"We still struggled with the balance and it's still incredibly difficult to drive the car," he explained. "I expect that's probably a similar story for everyone on track today," he admitted, "but we didn't change anything, we still have the same struggles and we just need time still to improve it."

Norris, who first coined the term "yo-yoing" of the numerous overtakes that dominated the opening laps of races at the start of the season, admitted surprise at Ferrari's poor performance this weekend, especially in the wake of Barcelona, as yo-yoing now appears to apply more to teams' track-to-track performance.

"I would say the pace seems to be a little bit better than we probably expected into Sunday," he said of the McLaren, "the shock was probably Ferrari today struggling so much," he added.

"To be honest I feel bad for them, I mean when you have no power you have to push like hell in the corners and you can't do that with these kind of tyres, so it's a tough race for them but otherwise not a bad race."

"That was the most I could have done," said teammate Piastri. "We didn't have the pace to do anything more to match Mercedes or Max, and to be beat both Ferraris was a really good day. So very happy with that."

The Australian believes that getting ahead of his teammate at the start of the race was crucial to how the afternoon played out.

"In terms of getting the pit priority I wanted, it's always the benefit of being the first car on the road for the team," he said. "The team did a good job on strategy not blinking too early, not letting anything slide.

"I think the pace after that was just strong and I was able to get ahead of Charles."

"At the moment we have to accept that our competitiveness is not such that we can fight for the podium unless there are some situations like the reliability problem for some competitors in Barcelona," admitted team boss, Andrea Stella.

"We know the mission is very clear," he continued. "We need to add performance to the car. We have upgrades coming, we need to deliver them and that's what we are working on.

"There's some positives," he insisted. "It's a fact that in the race we were in condition to fight with Ferrari. We finished ahead of Ferrari. We capitalised on the car interacting well with tyres.

"I think our people operated well from a strategy point of view, remaining patient without going too early in the first stop, and Oscar driving very well. We invested in understanding a few things after Barcelona and Oscar delivered that. So definitely positives. But the mission remains to make the MCL40 faster.

"Lando lost a position at the start," he added. "I think that put him a little bit on the back foot. But at the same time we have to say that he was missing a few tenths of a second. We will review like we did with Oscar after Barcelona."