Lando Norris admits that he initially thought that Charles Leclerc had made the right choice by starting the U.S. Grand Prix on softs.

Losing out to the Ferrari at the start, Leclerc taking full advantage of his soft to nail Norris in Turn 1, the Briton finally passed the Monegasque on Lap 20 as the tyre on the Ferrari began to fail.

The battle resumed after Norris' pit stop on Lap 32, but the Briton eventually overhauled Leclerc just a few laps from the end, the pair having provided some of the few highlights of the afternoon.

"Finally... finally, it took long enough," said Norris at rae end. "It was a good battle with Charles, he fought hard. It was tough.

"We did everything we could," he added. "I thought we had it in an easier way after we got ahead and we went much longer. I expected a slightly easier second attempt to get through but it wasn't the case."

Asked if he hadn't lost out too Leclerc at the start he might have had a different race, maybe taking the fight to Verstappen, Norris laughed.

"Who knows?" he said. "What was it that (Verstappen) said once... "if your mum had balls... she'd be your dad"? Who knows. But, you know, starting on the soft, starting on the right side of the grid... he (Leclerc) had the advantage in Turn 1, on the outside.

"After yesterday, obviously a little bit wary," he continued, referring to the infamous Sprint, "I didn't want to go too wide in Turn 1 because I didn't want to end up in the gravel again. So yeah, I kind of had to just stay on the inside and stick to the safer route. But Charles did a good job and I got past.

"Who knows after that? You know, I think I found it difficult enough just to get close to Charles, and their pace wasn't bad at all. Until, what, 10 laps to go he was like six seconds off Max. So it wasn't like we were that far away, or their pace was that bad. So, you know, I think it was a good race. The pace was pretty close. I think that's why it was so difficult - because we were quicker, for sure, but not by a lot. And therefore, there were some challenging lap-after-lap battles, trying to put him under pressure, trying to make him make some mistakes here and there. He didn't make many, for sure. But I think especially the final stint, I managed to get the tyres into a good window, drop back a few seconds, re-attack, and I managed to kind of catch him a bit more off guard, let's say, with a couple of laps. So, a good result in the end. For a minute, I was not expecting to finish second. I thought he was just a bit too quick for us. But to get back into second and get past was perfect."

Asked if he regretted not starting on the soft, Norris said: "I regret not putting a perfect lap and not going purple, purple, purple yesterday in qualifying.

"You know, you can't ask these questions. I mean, you could do many different things. You never know what's going to work out. I don't think our strategy was wrong. I think we did a good job. Potentially, we should have... we'll look back and see if we should have just boxed as soon as we got ahead of Charles or just tried an undercut and see if that worked out. But it was a long way to go on the soft, and then you put yourself under Safety Car risk.

"So there's many different things that can go your way. Otherwise, I think we did a good job. I think we took the correct amount of risk in the position that we're in, and I'm happy and satisfied with the result - as much as I would have loved to be further up."

"Without having to fight with Charles, which was certainly an entertaining fight itself, I think Lando had the pace to win the race today," said team boss Andrea Stella, when asked about starting Norris on softs. "Obviously, he needed to gain the position on track, which is never easy with Max, and with a one-stop strategy, not necessarily we would have had many opportunities from a strategic point of view, but performance-wise, I think we are reassured that the pace was sufficient to fight for the victory.

"Not having done the sprint race left us a little bit on the back foot from a set-up point of view, and with insight we can see already that there was more performance that we could have extracted from the car.

"Honestly, it worked well for Leclerc," he said of the softs, "well done to Ferrari. I think this was a good way of keeping them in contention for finishing second.

"We did not consider that," he continued. "We were a little surprised of seeing Ferrari starting on soft. I think most on the grid will have been surprised because Leclerc was one of the few cars in the Top Ten, I think the only one in the Top Ten starting on soft.

"We were not even sure that a medium-soft could have been a feasible one-stop," he admitted. "So we just discovered through the race what the strategy should have been. We saw very early that the hard tyre wasn't a good tyre because people were coming off the hard tyre and therefore it looked like the medium-soft was a possibility."So in this sense, I think Ferrari had done a good job of anticipating that starting on soft was a good idea.

"Unfortunately for us, it cost us that Lando's race was determined by Leclerc's pace because he followed all the way, rather than by our overall pace.

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