McLaren Team Principal Andreas Seidl has said that his team needs to be realistic and not expect to be challenging right at the front of the field every weekend as they did in Austria.

The Red Bull Ring proved a happy hunting ground for the Woking-based team last Sunday as Lando Norris stuck his car on the front row in qualifying and earned a podium place during the race, whilst Daniel Ricciardo recovered well from a tough Saturday to score good points in the Grand Prix.

Indeed, it was very refreshing to see the papaya-clad McLaren of Norris, in particular, mixing it with Mercedes and Red Bull right at the sharp end, with him possessing buckets of pace throughout the weekend in Spielberg.

Seidl, though, has admitted that it won't be the case every weekend that we see the Maccas at the head of the field, with him saying that some tracks will not suit the car as much as the Red Bull Ring did and that there is still a deficit to be made up to the top two teams:

“I think we need to be realistic, it was a track that suits our car," Seidl began.

“What was good to see is that I think, compared to last weekend, with the developments and with the fine-tuning we did with the set-up as well, we definitely made a step forward in terms of performance, both in qualifying and in the race.

“That allowed us to be in a position today to battle some of the top cars.

“But I don’t know exactly which issues for example Mercedes had or Lewis had, which gave us a chance to then score a podium purely down to our own performance, which is great.

“There’s no point to see things that aren’t there.

“You need to be realistic and, if you see the race for example last weekend and we’re here at the same track one weekend later, then we had no chance to battle these four cars. There was a huge gap.

“So we knew that we would have a better car compared to last weekend, but we couldn’t expect that we could actually fight them like that.

“At the same time, we don’t know which problems they experienced: especially Mercedes.

“We know exactly where we stand as a team, we know what the deficit is. We know what the deficit also still is at the team’s side in terms of infrastructure and so on. So it’s not a surprise that we are where we are.

“We are on a journey. We have a clear plan of how we want to reduce this deficit and that takes some years, but the good thing is we make steps.

“We’re ambitious, but there is no magic and I simply think it’s always good to have a sense of realism, and not get carried away with results like Austria, which are great and give good energy to the team.

“But it doesn’t change the picture, the realistic picture we have in terms of where we are."