LANDO NORRIS INTERVIEW
Lando Norris is a king of online racing – and, increasingly, making his mark in the ‘real’ world championship as well. Mclaren reckon his progress towards becoming one of Formula 1’s top dogs is almost complete…
One of F1’s new stars explains his leap forward in 2021
SOME DRIVERS ARRIVE
in Formula 1 thrillingly complete. Others are still on what’s known in modern media-saturated parlance as “the journey”. For every Lewis Hamilton – podium finisher in his first grand prix, polesitter and winner of his sixth – there are dozens of other slower-burning talents who had to feel their way carefully towards becoming the finished article.
Lando Norris is perhaps one such. Aged 19 when he made his F1 debut at the 2019 Australian Grand Prix, he was by no means the first teenager to break into motor racing’s top echelon. But there were those who interpreted his boyish swagger and fondness for japery as an inherent lack of seriousness – for certain eminences grise within the paddock, a cardinal and career-limiting sin. The truth was anything but: as he’s revealed recently, beneath the veneer of effervescent good humour he was quietly undergoing a crisis of confidence and went into every grand prix weekend plagued by self-doubt.
He’s done much to dispel those fears, claiming a first podium finish with a buccaneering drive at last year’s season opener, and emerging as one of this season’s feistiest contenders among the midfield teams – to the extent that Mclaren is realistically targeting third place in the constructors’ championship ahead of a resurgent Ferrari. This could be the closest Mclarenvs-ferrari fight since 2008 and Norris, with a freshly minted contract renewal in his pocket, is right at the heart of it.
“Coming into the season, even the test before the Bahrain GP, I was just a lot more confident in myself,” Norris tells GP Racing. “I knew what I wanted to get out of every session. And I guess in the first year, there’s just so many things to think of, it’s hard to go, ‘OK, this session all I’m going to focus on is that’. Sometimes you can, but in the back of your head, there’s a lot of other things you’ve got to be thinking about. Now, a lot of things just come more naturally. And I can just focus more specifically on single areas and really try to nail that area, and then once I’ve done that I can move on to the next one.
“That definitely helps the confidence. And I’m almost more excited going into every race weekend, because I feel like I’m doing a better job than ever, and we’re getting better results, which always makes it more exciting. And I feel like there’s more opportunities every weekend for me to try something different, to do that next step which makes me a better driver. Definitely a big difference from year one.”
Experience seems to have been the key to this improvement in mind-management. Mclaren team principal Andreas Seidl speaks of Norris as a work in progress, one who in a few years “will have everything a top Formula 1 driver needs”. He praises Norris’s improved application during race weekends, both behind the scenes and in the car, as well as his capacity to analyse – along with his engineering team – previous performances to evolve his approach.
As a result, reckons Seidl, Norris has a clearer picture of what’s required in the preparatory track sessions, is sharper on what has to be done and when during qualifying, and is increasingly precise in race starts and during opening laps, as well as having an awareness of the bigger picture around him as a grand prix evolves. Perhaps most importantly, these sharpened elements of the craft are registering on the timesheets. For a handful of seconds during qualifying for the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix at Imola back in April, Norris was third quickest until has time was scrubbed because he slid 3cm beyond the track limits at Piratella. He excoriated himself on live television afterwards but managed to claim a second career podium in the race, albeit with some assistance from other podium contenders eliminating themselves and Mclaren’s strategists making an adventurous tyre call during the resulting stoppage.
“The most obvious thing for me is the lap times he's putting in consistently, which is the most important thing for me,” said Seidl at the time. “As I’ve said many times, if these lap times don’t come I can’t fix it. It’s got to come from these guys. And these times are the result of the hard work he’s done with our engineering team to learn from his second season in Formula 1 last year, digesting it in the right way, making the right conclusions and coming back this year in a position to make the next step. And I can clearly see also in terms of personality and character he’s made the next step.”
“I’ve spent more time than ever,” says Norris, “in terms of preparation and everything, for every race weekend: on the simulator in the factory, sitting down with the engineers before and after every session. It’s not about the effort level, because I think I’ve always put as much effort in as I can, it’s just more dedication and time put into everything. It’s that, coupled with more experience coming for my third year, refreshed over the winter, reviewing everything from last season and just coming back and having another crack at it.
“I don’t think there’s loads of different things I’ve changed. I’m still the same guy, trying just as hard as I was before, but with some more experience, some more knowledge, and better ideas about what works for me and what doesn’t
“I’M ALMOST MORE EXCITED GOING INTO EVERY RACE WEEKEND, BECAUSE I FEEL LIKE I’M DOING A BETTER JOB THAN EVER, AND WE’RE GETTING BETTER RESULTS, WHICH ALWAYS MAKES IT MORE EXCITING”
in terms of setting up the car and so on. It’s just been about putting that together, really.
“Some of the tracks we’ve gone to this season, such as Baku and Monaco, it was my second time there in Formula 1, although it’s my third season – and I could tell the difference from two years ago, when they were just my fourth and sixth F1 races. The difference is huge. You know, going to Monaco for your first time in F1 is pretty scary, you don’t know what to expect; this time I came into it with a much better idea of what I wanted to accomplish in FP1 and FP2, putting the pieces of the puzzle together ahead of qualifying and the race.”
There abides a lingering perception among some Formula 1 commentators that qualifying is one of Norris’s weaker suits, a belief which simply doesn’t stand up to serious examination. He was pretty much even with Carlos Sainz in his first two years and has had the measure of new team-mate Daniel Ricciardo while the Australian has battled to adapt his technique to suit the car. Perhaps Lando’s tendency post-session to own up to and flagellate himself for any mistakes has fed the narrative.
This season Norris has unquestionably been getting the business done on Saturday afternoons in a car which has required both drivers to adapt their driving styles. Mclaren’s MCL35M might be a sequel but it’s a very different car to drive than the MCL35. Faster down the straights thanks to a (new for this year) Mercedes engine, coupled to an aero map which is less draggy for given levels of downforce than its closest rivals, the Mclaren is also strong in high-speed corners.
Slow-corner performance was a limiting factor early on, a consequence of running a slightly longer wheelbase than the likes of Ferrari, Red Bull and Alphatauri. As with the long-wheelbase Mercedes, the MCL35M is naturally a little more reluctant to rotate towards the apex of such corners. Confident that it can take the fight for third in the championship to Ferrari, Mclaren has ploughed resources into addressing these shortcomings through a series of updates in Portugal, Spain and Monaco, centring around a new front wing and revised floor.
Like several other teams, Mclaren has had to combat handling imbalances brought on by the new floor regulations: the rear end is now much more sensitive to sudden changes of load as the car dives under braking. A less aggressive front wing design, combined with detail work around the floor area – Mclaren has embraced the fashionable Z-shaped cut-outs at each side – reduces this sensitivity to changes in pitch and makes the car more driveable.
The team’s development path will now focus on what Andreas Seidl describes as “low-hanging fruit” ahead of a complete switch to 2022 development – so Norris and Ricciardo will have to work with what they’ve got.
All of that makes Norris’s performance in Monaco all the more remarkable: on a track unsuited to the Mclaren’s performance envelope, he qualified fifth overall – just 0.274s off Charles Leclerc’s polesitting Ferrari and 0.044s off second-placed Max Verstappen’s Red Bull. Significantly, Ricciardo – a driver famed not only for late braking, but also for his aptitude in manipulating braking effort to persuade a car to turn-in faster – failed to progress from Q2. Norris obviously has a well-developed feel for how to modulate the pedal while trail-braking
the car into slow corners without triggering rear-end instability. So, while it’s the points that count, and Norris’s podium finish in Monaco was a welcome result on a day Ferrari missed a huge scoring opportunity, even he admitted the result required “a bit of luck”. That qualifying time was arguably the more impressive achievement.
More recently Norris finished ‘best of the rest’ again, fifth in the French GP after what had been a disappointing qualifying for him (P10) and an unusually passive opening lap in which he dropped two places. Handed an adventurous tyre strategy which called upon him to extend his opening stint into the hinterlands of the medium compound’s life, he maximised the advantage this gave him in the second half of the race: overtaking both Ferraris, the Alphatauri of Pierre Gasly, and his own team-mate.
“I’d say I only got on top of last year’s car towards the mid-to-end of last year,” says Norris. “I was kind of confident coming into this season I would continue that – ‘OK, I’ve got this car nailed and I know what to do’. But it was almost the opposite and that hampered me in the first couple of races of the season, especially Bahrain. I was still trying to drive it too much like last year’s car, and that wasn’t good. So, I’ve had to adjust and then I’ve been able to maximise things again.
“I didn’t feel like I did a great job in the first race of the season because I was still too used to last year and trying to drive like that. But then, because of learning so much over the past couple of seasons, I’ve got used to some of the differences and I’ve been able to focus – on the simulator and in practice sessions – on adapting to this car and understanding how I have to drive it. I feel like I’m doing a much better job – I’ve had some of my best qualifying sessions, the best race I’ve ever done. I believe it’s down to that.
“It’s still not perfect, I don’t go out in every session and think that I know exactly how to drive this car to the absolute limit. I’m still trying to figure out some things. It’s clearly not easy, because Daniel [Ricciardo] hasn’t found it easy. But it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes you can have a very quick car that’s difficult to drive, even though, as a driver, you always want one that’s easy to go quick in. But we’ve taken a step forward this year, the guys and girls did an excellent job to make some good improvements, and that’s shown from the results we’ve had. But there’s plenty more to keep plugging away at and try to improve because we don’t have the quickest car yet, and that’s what we want.”
Three seasons in, Lando Norris has markedly evolved from the driver who arrived in F1 without winning the Formula 2 championship.
Back then he seemed very much in George Russell’s shadow; now he’s firmly established as a senior driving partner at Mclaren and a key figure in that team’s future – “an integral part of our recovery plan” as Andreas Seidl puts it. While Russell – who beat Norris to the F2 title in 2018 – has been for the most part less exposed in F1 by driving a tail-end car against weaker team-mates, Norris has had to do his growing up in public, nearer the front of the grid and with sterner opposition in the garage next door.
Having reached this point, Norris isn’t going to allow himself to become distracted. Ricciardo has talked about the possibility of leveraging Mclaren’s connections elsewhere in the motorsport firmament to race at Bathurst or test an Indycar, both enthusiasms shared by CEO Zak Brown. For Norris it’s a definite no for now: “I think I’d love to drive an Indycar at some point. And then maybe I’d need to test on an oval and see if I have the balls to do that.
“But not anytime soon, truthfully, because I have a lot of focus on F1. It’s all I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid, and I have a lot to accomplish here.”
“I’D LOVE TO DRIVE AN INDYCAR AT SOME POINT, BUT NOT ANYTIME SOON, TRUTHFULLY, BECAUSE I HAVE A LOT OF FOCUS ON F1 AND I HAVE A LOT TO ACCOMPLISH HERE”