Lando Norris doubts that he would have beaten Max Verstappen to the 2024 Formula 1 title even with a perfect season.
Norris' dwindling chances of a title came to an end at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, having needed to outscore Verstappen by three points to take the fight to the following round in Qatar.
The Red Bull driver finished fifth ahead of Norris to complete his title defence as the Briton struggled with front graining over the race distance, although a late switch to softs helped him to swipe the fastest lap point.
Norris felt that it had been a big achievement for McLaren to climb up the pecking order into regular victory contention and said: "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. We were the fourth-best team at the beginning of the year.
"Red Bull have never been the fourth-best team or worst, let's say, ever. We had just too big of a deficit to catch up from the beginning of the season, and we could not, 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, and we've not been able to do that for the last six years, so I'm excited for that.
"But I'm proud of what we've achieved. My first win in Formula 1, my first three [wins], no one else is there fighting him. It's been me and it's been McLaren.
"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. So I'm happy to finish second."
Watch: Why Verstappen's 2024 Title Success is His Greatest Yet - F1 Las Vegas GP Analysis
With McLaren's focus now on securing the constructors' title, Norris said that he was more worried about the difficult run McLaren faced in Vegas rather than being satisfied Mercedes helped to mitigate the damage to Ferrari with its 1-2 finish.
"I don't think of those things [Mercedes beating Ferrari], I think of how bad our car was today," he explained. "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.
"It doesn't work in many other tracks where we've had similar conditions, but we've been able to get everything out of it sometimes, 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, and if I tried, I would probably end up in the wall somewhere."
