Hard lessons, racing Verstappen and fan criticism - Norris interview
Wed 20, Nov, 2024
Source: The Race
Lando Norris has a conflicted view of his 2024 Formula 1 season.
He thinks it’s been “a very good year” but is sympathetic to more negative perspectives of his nearly-but-not-quite title bid.
“From the outside, I understand why people think it hasn't been,” Norris tells The Race.
“And I completely…almost agree with it!
“But once you know the reasons why different things [happened], I'm still pretty proud of the season it's been so far.”
This is by a long way Norris’s most prolific season in F1: three grand prix wins (so far), seven poles, 12 podiums and second in the championship.
There’s a slightly sour taste, though, from the failure to capitalise on McLaren’s great momentum through the year as Red Bull’s struggles made Max Verstappen vulnerable.
Norris pauses briefly for thought on numerous occasions in this conversation with The Race, which takes place in Mexico, before Verstappen’s unlikely, exceptional win in the Brazilian Grand Prix moved Norris’s title hopes from ‘unlikely’ to ‘all but over’.
The knowledge that this will imminently be settled in Verstappen’s favour, perhaps as early as this weekend in Las Vegas, only makes Norris’s dissection of his season more poignant. There is something cathartic about the way he works through the highs and lows of 2024, where he agrees with certain criticisms, where he feels the need to push back.
“I think that's quite obvious,” he says when asked if there’s a sense of what might have been this year.
“Not as many [missed opportunities] as people think. And people in general think it's been a lot worse than it's been, that we've been a lot quicker than we have been.
“It’s a compliment because it shows how far we've come, and I'm proud that in those days, whether Singapore or Zandvoort, I've still been the one that's there and making the most of those opportunities.
“But there's clearly ones that we've definitely let things go away: Silverstone, Canada-ish – I wouldn't say completely. Maybe one or two others.
“The other ones are the ones that people want to believe were bad for different reasons. When the starts have been ‘bad’, I've generally still been in the top three, four, five of starts, even on those days.
“If you look at Barcelona, when I had a ‘bad’ start everyone says, the best starter in that race was Max. And I think I was like the third or fourth third best starter on the grid.
“It's just I happened to be next to the guy who got the best start.
“The other one I’d say was a bit more unlucky was Budapest, where my initial start was very good, a tiny, tiny bit too much wheelspin and a downgraded upshift, and that kind of cost me that [victory].”
The Barcelona start defence is slightly convenient, given that guy also happened to be the other title protagonist. But at the same time, it would be naive to think that any champion is the number one at everything all season long. The reality of a championship is that it has ups and downs: isolated defeats are inevitable and isolated moments of greatness aren’t a sure-fire sign of title worthiness.
Norris, being in the final throes of this season and focusing on getting McLaren’s constructors’ championship sealed, is probably still in the process of evening out the oscillations to work out exactly where the real opportunities are to improve for 2025. He calls this a “big learning year, even though it's my sixth year and all of this nonsense”.
“It's been better than people have thought,” he says.
“There's definitely been some missed opportunities. That's a fact. But I'm very happy with my whole season. I still feel like I've got a lot out of it. Things have not just gone to plan.
“There's been certain races which have gone away from us.
“But I'm pretty happy with the whole season that I had, because it's clear when things do go right, how amazing that they can be.”
'THE HARSH REALITY' AGAINST VERSTAPPEN
There are seven occasions this year where McLaren has had the ‘fastest’ car, based on each team’s quickest laptimes from each weekend in the dry. But only three wins for Norris. And only two from seven pole positions.
It has brought forth some critical responses from those who remember Norris saying of Lewis Hamilton in 2020: “He's in a car which should win every race, basically. He has to beat one or two other drivers, that's it. Fair play to him, he's still doing the job he has to do.”
Norris was wrong to say that and apologised soon after it happened. Given for much of 2020 it was Hamilton versus team-mate Valtteri Bottas for every race win, though, you could see the point Norris was trying to make, even though he did so a little gracelessly.
Now though, the argument is that Norris, 20 at the time, was disrespectful back then and is finding out now it’s not as easy as he claimed it would be. Put that to Norris and he insists: “First of all, I would never think that! For anyone who knows me, that's definitely not how I think.
“But I would say it's as tough as I've imagined because so many things can still easily go against you, even when you have the best car.
“Make one mistake in a Q3 lap, you're not on pole when you should have been. You don't have a perfect start when the guy who starts P2 does a perfect start, you’re P2 when you shouldn't have been.
“There's been a couple when we were so dominant – like Zandvoort – it doesn't matter if you made the mistakes at the beginning. You can come back through and you can still dominate and easily win a race.
“But when people think we've had the most dominant car ever…I’ve been on pole by three thousandths or five thousandths or two hundredths, and those positions are positions that just stay for the rest of the race.
“I've always known that – it’s just the harsh reality of when you're there, and actually you're living that situation.”
Where Norris missed out certainly wasn’t a solo effort. The poles have been ‘wasted’ for various reasons.
Norris has, as mentioned, lost critical ground at the start that stopped him winning in Spain and Hungary. He was outmuscled by Piastri again in Italy, where McLaren was also caught out by an unlikely Ferrari/Charles Leclerc one-stop.
Norris was then too naive into the first corner in the United States, giving Verstappen the chance to bully him off-track, and was on the wrong end of another run-in later in the race as Norris got penalised for an illegal overtake. Then in Brazil, where Norris was jumped at the start, he got shuffled further back by the mid-race red flag that was perfect for Verstappen, and made a mistake at the subsequent restart.
The pole-to-win ratio doesn’t even take into account the chances Norris had to win races he didn’t start from pole at: like Canada or Britain, two races where strategic hesitations in mixed conditions cost McLaren and Norris dearly.
This reflects too many errors from driver and team, too many minor imperfections, which is simply not good enough to match the level Verstappen and Red Bull set for their title rivals.
“The thing is suddenly I'm fighting them for a win,” Norris says.
“So not doing a perfect job against these drivers, mainly Max in this case, means I win a race or I don't, and therefore it hurts a bit more and it feels like there's a bigger effect to it all.
“You win, suddenly you have a lot more praise. You do one mistake, you suddenly have a lot more criticism. Both are compliments in ways, and I've enjoyed both of them.
“But I've paid the price, more so in terms of a championship point of view when I’ve not done things to the correct level.
“You get punished more at the top when things don't go right than you do when you're more midfield.”
PUZZLED BY CRITICISM
Possibly the strangest narrative that Norris being on the periphery of a title challenge has created is the notion that Norris has been a hopeless contender: one of if not the worst of all time.
It wouldn’t merit much consideration beyond a swift dismissal of being unimaginative, overly simplistic and crude, if it didn’t feel so unusual, even by the modern social media standards.
Partisan fanbases have become more common in F1 and in principle there is nothing wrong with that. Tribalism is a fascinating dynamic in a lot of sports. But it comes with a downside that Norris has had to confront more than the average driver.
“I find it's a little bit weird, because I read all those things,” he says.
“Certain things, I don't understand how people have got that perception. And that's when I always just have to come back to the people who know me, know that this isn't the case.
“When people think my ego is too big or something, it couldn't be further from the truth - especially when I'm driving.
“Maybe sometimes I choose the wrong words or something, and people somehow use that against me.”
There’s a little irony that he says that given how he frames the point about not having an ego, but all he means is he is not full of braggadocio as a driver – something attested to by the sheer volume of critical comments he’s made about himself this year.
More importantly, this doesn’t feel like something he has previously considered in much detail. Norris is clearly developing a train of thought in real time.
“I think there's more and more people in the world who either don't want to listen to the truth, and sometimes when I say the truth or facts people just don't want to agree with them, or they want to disagree and kind of prove me wrong,” he wonders.
“I find it odd as I feel like I haven't changed. Maybe I have in certain things…Definitely some things have changed.
“I definitely don't go around and joke and laugh as much as I used to, and I think people loved that and maybe don't like it as much now I don't.”
For the full uncut Norris interview, exclusive bonus podcasts, discounts and much more, join The Race Members' Club on Patreon - Black Friday offers available now
Norris insists the negative perceptions and over-the-top criticisms don’t impact him as a driver. But there are obvious signs he feels it on a human level.
He admits that he can dwell on it at times “because I’m an over-thinker…so I’ll question myself about it”. But he has learned to shake things off quickly, and put more stock in what those around him say.
“I've always been honest when I've done a good job and done a bad job,” he says.
“When I know I've done something wrong, or someone tells me I've done something wrong, I'll always accept it and acknowledge that in the right way.
“But when I know for a fact I haven't, and people kind of make things of it or turn it into something where I have, there’s some kind of stuff I don't understand, especially the amount of negative stuff I get nowadays – I almost want to say for no reason.
“It puzzles me a little bit.
“I don't mind people having different opinions, but stating incorrect things is probably the thing that I don't understand, and probably the thing that gets to me the most.
“But it doesn't affect my day to day life at all. And I'm very happy with the people I have around me, my group.
“They're the people who are being more honest with me about when I'm doing well or when I'm not, or whether I'm being a dick, and when I'm not.”
NO EXCUSES FOR 2025
It looks likely that McLaren will this year end a title drought stretching back to Hamilton’s first world championship in 2008, by securing the constructors’ championship.
McLaren started 2023 with one of the slowest cars and was briefly last in the championship, but now ends the following season as the benchmark team. That’s despite beginning even 2024 a little slowly as it waited a few races for the most fruitful winter developments to make it to the track.
That cost Norris pivotal ground to Verstappen. But whatever was or wasn’t right about Norris’s 2024, and how it ends, will be wasted if he and McLaren don’t improve for 2025.
There will be no excuses next year. Fighting for both titles next year from the start is a must.
“That's very clear,” Norris says.
“We as a team know that next year is the year – probably the first one since I've been in Formula 1, where I can go ‘We are challenging for the title’.”
This is Norris’s reward for recommitting to McLaren a couple of years ago, when he signed a new long-term deal to draw a line under speculation linking him to Red Bull. Of course, it left him very well compensated. But it was still a show of loyalty.
“I’m very happy that I've stuck with the team that I believed in even when a lot of people didn't,” Norris says.
“And for all of that to actually come true, when it was hard to believe at times, when we could take two steps forward and then step back, and then catch up and then drop back. There were times when I did question it for sure, on what's the best for my future and what do I want to do.
“The fact we've been able to go from where we were to beating Red Bull, when not even 12 months ago they had the most dominant season, that’s an incredible achievement.
“I'm happy that I stuck through the harder times when I could have picked an easier route out of it, could have gone to different teams. The team understand that too, the journey that we've been on together, and I think they appreciate that, which probably makes me the happiest out of all of it.”
These opportunities are the ultimate validation of the faith Norris had in this team and failing at his first half-chance at a title can be part of the process. But he must still improve further to show this season is only part of the climb, rather than the summit.