Lando Norris is cracking under pressure of a championship battle with Max Verstappen

For the fifth time in seven races, Lando Norris and McLaren were in contention to win a grand prix. Yet once again, through a series of mistakes and operational errors they came up short.

Norris was in no mood to take the positives, blaming himself for the decision to pit a lap later than his rivals for dry tyres, a period in which he lost a lead he never regained.

“I’m just fed up of saying I should have done better and I should have done this or could have done that,” he said of a podium that, last year, warranted a true celebration at McLaren.

“I’m just disappointed. It’s a win in Formula One. Should we have won a race today? Yes. Did we? No. I’m not going to be happy with another third place.”

The turnaround in the last year for McLaren has been remarkable. Through a rapid and sustained development path they find themselves genuine frontrunners. Yet they have failed to maximise what has been on offer. There were several decisions at Silverstone that likely cost them points and, perhaps, victory. The first was the choice to leave Oscar Piastri out on dry tyres as the rain worsened when they could have double-stacked in the pit stop.

Team principal Andrea Stella said that the team were “greedy” in leaving him out. “I think we didn’t want to assert that we would have lost time with the double-stack,” he said after the race.

“But effectively sometimes you have to be patient and accept that you’re going to lose time but just do the right thing rather than hoping that one lap more is not going to cost that much.”

Then not only did Lando Norris stay out a lap longer than rivals Hamilton and Verstappen, Stella – and Norris – says they definitely chose the wrong compound tyre (soft) for the final stint, an error caused by over deliberating. Norris also overshot his marks at the stop.

“We should have taken the responsibility to say the medium is the right tyre – we go for it. In checking with Lando we self-doubt it and that led us to follow this direction which, with hindsight, wasn’t correct,” the Italian said.

The mistakes on Sunday follow on from Norris’s costly wheel-to-wheel battle for the lead in Austria a week ago, where patience may have paid dividends. In the sprint race a day before, an attempt at taking the lead compromised him and he lost second place to Piastri. The Briton also had a poor start from pole at the Spanish Grand Prix from which he had to fight back to second place as Verstappen narrowly won.

“When you race for the front positions it becomes much more visible when you have work to do,” was Stella’s observation on these near misses. They have certainly been apparent since Norris’s maiden victory in Miami in May.

Stella believes that the team, compared to Red Bull and Mercedes (who have won every championship between them since 2014) are a work in progress.

“They are even familiar with this kind of racing at the top, in changeable conditions and so on. From this point of view, we are more an under construction side. The opportunity will come soon, we need to be ready.”

There are, still, plenty of positives. McLaren are a serious championship force for the first time in over a decade. With that comes higher stakes – with Sergio Pérez underperforming at Red Bull, McLaren are in with a chance of their first constructors’ title since 1998. They have learned how to win again – but they must now learn how to keep winning.