Lando Norris has highlighted being less afraid of taking risks as the key thing that needs to change in the wake of McLaren's defeat to Max Verstappen in the Japanese Grand Prix.
Despite McLaren having a faster car than Red Bull at Suzuka last weekend, Norris and team-mate Oscar Piastri could not find a way past Verstappen - and their plight was further compounded by the team running a conventional strategy.
This included Norris following Verstappen into the pits on the same lap rather than trying to go offset on strategy.
Norris said he does not agree with criticism saying that McLaren messed up its strategy by not trying an undercut or overcut, but he did admit that what needs to be altered in the future is the willingness to embrace more risk taking.
Asked by The Race at the Bahrain Grand Prix about what the takeaways were from the team's strategy review of Japan, Norris said that a shift in mindset was needed.
"However much people want to talk and say things and say how bad a job we did, I disagree," he said.
"I stand by always our decisions as a team, and I have a lot of trust and faith that we always have our best interests at heart.
"Would I and have we reviewed what level of risk we want to take in different scenarios? I think that is probably our bigger question after last weekend.
"Would I be willing to take that risk of boxing behind more cars and go for the win? Yes. But we still finished second and third and we still got more points in the constructors', and I still had a good result as a driver for points."
Norris said the decisions McLaren took in Japan were understandable because there were no gaps in traffic to try an aggressive undercut, and little to gain from going long and dropping behind other cars.
But he thought in the future, he and McLaren must be willing to try something different - even if that opens the door to them getting it wrong on occasions and ending up with a worse result.
"There's an ability where I might want to take more risk to go for a win," he said.
"It's not always a guarantee. There might be more cases where I go for it, and I get stuck. Or Oscar undercuts me, or another driver undercuts me, and the price of taking a risk doesn't come out in my favour and actually I lose positions at the end of the day.
"I need to acknowledge that could be the case, and sometimes I will accept second is not a bad result.
"But I'm here to win races and not settle for second. Definitely from my side, I would love to go back and redo things with a slightly more aggressive approach.
"But I do know deep down it's a long season and sometimes points on the board is better than taking unnecessary risks."
While responsibility for strategy calls lies on the pitwall, Norris said he has some responsibility himself to push a bit more if there are opportunities to do things differently.
"It's never just down to me; of course I'll maybe push my preferences more or I can be a bit more forceful and be a bit more demanding with certain things in certain cases," he said.
"I also always know that the team have the best picture of the whole race, better than any other driver, but I also have the best feeling of the car, the tyres, and how overtaking might be, those kinds of things.
“You just need harmony between you and your race engineer and strategy team. It might be that I potentially need to be more demanding at times, and more pushing of the team.
"But it's just getting the dynamic right at the end of the day between that risk-reward factor and knowing how much risk you want to take on the day, and how aggressive you want to be."
