Lando Norris placed fourth in the Chinese Grand Prix Sprint race, with team mate Oscar Piastri coming home sixth. While Norris gained a position from Hamilton during the pit stop sequence under the late Safety Car, he was soon re-passed by his fellow Briton and ultimately had to settle for P4, ahead of penalised Mercedes man Kimi Antonelli. Asked about Mercedes and Ferrari's pace post-race, and for his general feelings, Norris said with a wry smile: “Well, I don't feel great about that! “It's just difficult to… especially when it's so cold as well, difficult to get the tyres working quickly, and the Ferrari could do that in a better way than we could, simply because they just have a little bit more grip at the minute. It's difficult to improve that much on our weak areas at the minute, but we made some progress, and we'll keep trying to improve on it. "But today was the best we could achieve, so I'm happy with that.” “He made a mistake at the last corner, and probably did a good job to keep it on the track to be honest,” explained Piastri. “It's a shame that… I just was opportunistic and you can't do anything with that. I think it was pretty clear that we didn't have the pace of Ferrari and Mercedes then, so I don't think it mattered too much – I think he would have come back past anyway. Clearly some work for us to do, so we'll try and make the car a bit quicker.”

The Briton went on to take victory, ahead of the other Ferrari of Charles Leclerc in second and Hamilton in third. When asked afterwards about the dicey opening laps – which were much like his early duel with Leclerc last time out in Australia – Russell responded: “Again, yeah! “I just spoke with Charles, we were like, ‘Actually, this is pretty fun in the end'! A lot of strategy at play and how you do the overtakes. “I hope it was a fun race to watch – usually the Sprint races are pretty boring – and then I got everything under control, [then there was the] Safety Car, but really happy to win.” It's not easy because this first corner's so long and it only takes one lap of pushing too much and you can destroy your front left tyre, so it was just sort of managing, and especially when we were battling. “And Lewis did an amazing job in the early laps – he caught me off guard – but [that's] 20 years' experience, so I've still got a little bit to learn there!” “I hope we can bring more, but yesterday was a really great day,” the Briton said. While he was able to climb back up the order, Antonelli served his penalty in the pits when the Safety Car was called following a stoppage on track for Audi's Nico Hulkenberg, resulting in a final position of P5. “It was a crazy race on my side,” the 19-year-old said. “Obviously with the start we need to check what happened, what went wrong – probably I think it was something on my side. “And then the pace was decent to be fair. Obviously I came back into P2, but then the Safety Car came out and I had to serve the 10 seconds and then fell back again.