Lando Norris came to Las Vegas with a mathematical chance of catching Max Verstappen in the championship standings, but the McLaren driver admitted that it never really looked likely.
Norris had been 47 points behind his Red Bull rival after Mexico, but Verstapen's success in the rain proved a game changer. Just finishing ahead of Norris in this weekend's Vegas night race was enough to seal the deal.
Afterwards, Norris congratulated his rival and admitted that he never thought it would be possible to close the gap to the Dutch driver in the final trio of races.
"Firstly, big congratulations to Max on winning the drivers championship. He deserved it. He drove better than everyone over the course of the year and rarely makes a mistake, so congrats to him for delivering once again.
"I'm very proud of the whole team for putting up the fight for so long, for starting to catch up and catching up as much as we did," Norris said after the chequered flag. "We were the fourth-best team at the beginning of the year!
"Red Bull have never been the fourth-best team or worse, let's say, ever," he pointed out. "We had just too big of a deficit to catch up from the beginning of the season, and we couldn't [do it] because they've been too strong.
"Next year we'll go into the season with a car we think we can win a championship with from round one," he pledged. "We've not been able to do that for the last six years, so I'm excited for that."
Although any chance of this year's title has slipped away, Norris was still lookling on the bright side of what the team had done this year which delivered his first three GP career wins at Miami, Zandvoort and Singapore.
"I'm proud of what we've achieved. My first win in F1, my first three [victories]", he continued. "Could we have done some things better? Absolutely. Do I think we could have won the championship even with a perfect season? I don't.
"No one else is there fighting [Verstappen and Red Bull]. It's been me and it's been McLaren," he pointed out. "So I'm happy to finish second."
Although the drivers championship is done and dusted, the constructors battle is still wide open with McLaren just 24 points ahead of Ferrari and Red Bull not too far behind in third with two races remaining in Qatar and Abu Dhabi.
The fact that the MCL38 never really came alive this weekend has left Norris focused on getting the most out of the car in the final two weekends ahead rather than dwelling on what can't be changed.
"I don't think of those things, I think of how bad our car was today," he insisted. "That's what worries me, not Mercedes being strong. It was how poor we've been all weekend.
"Clearly we have a lot of work to do with our car. It's too difficult to drive. It doesn't work in these conditions," he said referring to the colder night time weather in Vegas.
"It doesn't work in many other tracks where we've had similar conditions, but we've still been able to get everything out of it even when people think we've had the best car, we've absolutely not.
"We still won some of those races, and those were the great weekends. But this weekend, even if I feel like I drove pretty well, I couldn't get anything more out of it," he lamented. "If I'd tried, I would probably end up in the wall.
"It was a reasonable race but we didn’t have any pace in the car, and experienced difficult, challenging conditions. It’s just not been our weekend, we struggled a lot.
"We'll now turn our attention to next weekend and coming back stronger in Qatar," he concluded. "All our focus is on these last two races.”
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