Lando Norris believes that had his team undercut Charles Leclerc today, he could have split the Ferraris.

Though ahead of the Ferrari in the opening stages of the race, Norris lost out when the Maranello outfit went for the undercut.

The Woking outfit then pitted Oscar Piastri before calling in Norris several laps later.

As the pair pursued the Monegasque, the order was given to Piastri to swap positions with his teammate on his fresher rubber.

As Norris gradually reeled in the Ferrari, once again the Maranello outfit went for the undercut, leaving Norris ruing the fact that his team hadn't adopted a similar strategy.

"When you take the Red Bull out of it, I would say it was not," he replied when asked if he was surprised to find himself on the podium. "I think our pace has been good all weekend.

"We put things together very nicely yesterday and showed a good long-run pace on Friday," he added. "So I wouldn't have said we had no chance.

"I didn't expect for us to be competing against the Ferraris today," he admitted, "and I think our pace was not as good as Carlos's, but probably better than Charles'.

"Being honest, we maybe missed out a little bit on an opportunity to be P2 today. For us to say that, it's a good sign and I think it's a good positive for the whole team, a good boost."

The Briton subsequently revealed that the plan had been to pit at the point when Ferrari actually called Leclerc in and as a result the Briton was left out for a further six laps.

"We didn't leave anything on the table, but the lap we were going to undercut, he boxed," he said. "So, you have to go on off and then do kind of a different strategy.

"We were close in the second stint and, if I boxed, I think I would have undercut," he sighed. "I missed that opportunity.

"You always think what if we did it one lap earlier, but it's tough to make all those decisions at the time. It can easily go wrong, there are always some consequences of doing so.

"I still think we did a very good job today. Third and fourth for us as a team is positive and a good load of points, but Ferrari was clearly the better team and they have a better car at the minute."

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