Lando Norris 'worked out Lewis Hamilton pretty quickly' at Italian Grand Prix

The McLaren driver defended Hamilton during Saturday’s F1 Sprint and said the experience was valuable for Sunday’s race

Lando Norris said he figured out how to defend Lewis Hamilton “quite quickly” at the Italian Grand Prix.

While Hamilton crashed out of Sunday’s race following an extraordinary collision with Max Verstappen, Norris finished second on the podium behind McLaren team-mate Daniel Ricciardo.

The 21-year-old qualified ahead of Hamilton following Saturday’s F1 Sprint at Monza after holding off the seven-time world champion during the 18-lap race, before he was then faced with the same challenge on Sunday.

Hamilton managed to overtake Norris shortly before the first round of pit-stops, but the McLaren driver claimed he was able to deal with Hamilton “reasonably easily” during the pair’s latest battle on the track.

“I think I had a good warm-up for that yesterday with 18 laps trying to defend from him,” Norris told David Coulthard after securing his latest podium position in F1.

“I could figure him out quite quickly, where he was going to strong and weak and so on, and he was on the hard tyre, so for the majority of it, I could hold him off reasonably easily.

“On the last two or three laps of the stint, the hard tyre started to come back to him quite a bit – or the mediums started to drop away so he actually got past me, he then boxed and we overcut him straight away.

“The whole race was stressful, not going to lie. There was not one moment where I thought I could relax and just chill-out a little bit. But that definitely makes it a bit more special, more worthwhile to kind of have to really work for it, and end up in this position to get past Charles [Leclerc] as well on the restart, and so on.”

Norris’ second-place finish was his best to date in F1, and his fourth podium of the season. The McLaren driver is fourth in the championship standings with eight races of the season remaining and has a 14-point lead over Red Bull’s Sergio Perez.