Lando Norris may have won the opening round of the world championship, but that doesn’t mean he’s comfortable at the wheel of his team’s latest car.
This is Norris’s seventh season at McLaren, the only team he has driven for in Formula 1. Last year’s McLaren was quick enough to deliver the constructors’ championship, but Norris wasn’t always satisfied with its handling characteristics. “Some of the traits are the same” in this year’s car, he said.
“It still doesn’t suit my driving style at all. I think I’ve almost gotten to a point where I’ve just accepted that you can’t have a perfect car that suits your style. Maybe it suits some people, but I’ve kind of stopped asking for exactly what I want and more just focused on whatever makes the car quicker.”
Despite that, the MCL39 is definitely an improvement on last year’s car, he said. “It’s probably a tricky car to drive and to put together a lap, but clearly it’s taken a step forward from last year. At the end of the day, my job is to drive whatever car I get given. That’s why I’m here. That’s why McLaren wanted me. They believe I can drive it better than others can.”
Norris said the way the car turns in to corners doesn’t match his instinctive driving style. “Some of the characteristics I don’t like and don’t suit the way I want to drive, in an attacking way. It doesn’t suit me in terms of me wanting to push the entries and push the braking. It’s very weak, I would say, from that point of view. Not what I like.”
He’s come to accept some aspects of the car’s handling are fundamental to how McLaren designs chassis. “Some of it is down to the adaptation, needing to change my driving style every year, because the car I drive is very different from what McLaren was a few years ago – clearly, because then we were at the back and now we’re at the front.
“But some things carry on. Some things are like ‘this is a McLaren’ for those reasons and I’ve only ever driven McLarens, so that’s all I know. I think it’s unique in certain aspects.”
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Other drivers have remarked on the particular handling characteristics of McLarens, such as Norris’s former team mates Carlos Sainz Jnr and Daniel Ricciardo.
“Obviously we have our strengths and weaknesses and whenever someone has been at McLaren and gone to another team they have often said how hard or odd the McLaren has been to drive, whether that’s Daniel or with Carlos,” he said.
“It’s also all I’ve got used to, so I’ve got to the point where I’ll just drive whatever car I have to drive. As long as it’s fighting for a win and quick enough to fight for a win, I’m happy enough to drive what I’m given.”
Although the team has tried to develop a chassis which has the handling traits he wants, the pursuit of performance has forced him to accept compromises.
“The thing is the aero guys and girls back in the factory, they just try to find lap time,” he said. “You’ve got to balance how you work the car.
“Like certain other teams have said, at times you can try to find a more peaky aero balance. If it works at the peak, it’s better, but it might be trickier to drive and worse in windy conditions. Or, do you try to get rid of some of that peak grip and make it a slightly more all-rounded car?
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“You have to play with this balance, because it’s difficult to get both. You have to choose what direction you want to go in.”
Norris also suspects the handling characteristics he desires are not easy for the team to create. “Definitely I think some of what I want from a car is, first of all, just very hard to get. That’s probably the best answer.
“For me, a good front at the apex, that’s kind of all I feel like I want. I very rarely have what I need, from that perspective.
“But the car can still win races. It’s not like if I don’t have what I want, the car is bad. I can still get the most out of the car, if I don’t have what I want. There are just compromises.”
He suspects the performance compromises needed to make the car suit his driving style are not worth making.
“It’s so complicated when the guys and the girls try to take you through [it]. If I do want more front end at mid-corner, at the minute we can only get that if we compromise low-speed or high-speed performance, or making the car more sensitive to windy conditions.
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“There are so many compromises you have to make and at the end of the day, you just want the best all-rounded car. I think that’s the main answer to it all.”
As a result, Norris said his attitude towards getting what he wants from a car has changed. “I think I’ve got a better understanding of that over the past couple of years on driving styles, how I need to drive the car,” he said.
“Maybe making a bit of that switch from ‘I want this from the car, and I want to keep driving my way until you make it more suited to me;’ I guess I’ve kind of thrown that away and just said, ‘alright, give me the best car, and I need to adapt a lot more to the car I get given.’
“It’s not the most comfortable, it’s not what I like the most, it’s [not] what I can get the most out of. But over the last year and a half, I’ve probably learned more about my driving than I did in the previous five years, just because the car has changed, and I’ve fallen into this philosophy of ‘give me the best car and I’ll adapt to that’ rather than ‘give me the car I want’.”
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