Norris: I had to relearn a lot in 2022

Lando Norris is preparing for his fifth season at McLaren, but now in the role of team leader: this year he has a new team-mate, Oscar Piastri. Last year’s MCL36 was not an easy car and Daniel Ricciardo never managed to find his way into it, so McLaren decided to part with it.

The results of an experienced Australian, who was always considered a fast racer, against the background of Norris’s stability, the results seemed really unconvincing, and at the end of the season Lando earned more than three times as many points. However, he himself cannot fully explain why this happened. Most importantly, he also had to work hard to achieve good performances.

“Even when I thought I was doing great, there were times when Daniel was very confident,” Norris told The Race. – When I analyzed what he had done, I had to make an extra effort to work better.

When I first came into Formula 1, I wanted to get behind the wheel and drive a perfect circle right away. But only now do I believe that I can try out many different techniques in practice and then put everything together in qualifying. For the first two years I couldn’t…

But now there is confidence that I can drive a good circle and at the same time focus on the perception of the maximum possible amount of information. It is possible that someone can work better than you, but you have to do your best and understand if you can find the limit of the possible.

Driving the MCL36 was not easy. It was necessary to understand its features and characteristics. At the beginning of last season, my style of piloting was not at all what I should have achieved. Although it was a McLaren car and some of the difficulties associated with it were known to us, it required a completely different approach. So I actually had to learn a lot.

At the start of the year, Daniel’s natural driving style suited the car better than me, and I had to force myself to fly differently. I think I did a good job with it and it compares to the way Carlos Sainz worked at Ferrari. At the beginning of the season he also complained and also had to put in a lot of effort to learn how to squeeze everything out of the car.

Ultimately, this is the racer’s job, no matter what car they have at their disposal. Easy to fly it or difficult, it’s up to the rider to adapt to it and understand how to act to reach the highest possible speeds. But this takes time.

A lot depends on braking and corner entry, on braking and steering, on how correctly you combine these actions. In one corner you have to work a certain way, but in the next you literally have to do it the other way around, simply because it has a slightly different configuration and even because the wind is blowing in it just a little differently.

Your task is to learn how to pass each specific turn behind the wheel of this specific car in your own way. The main difficulty is to understand: you do not control the car on the track as a whole, but in each individual turn. To be honest, this is not such a pleasant and easy task …

I agree that McLaren cars have some characteristic features no matter what they are expressed in. Maybe they suit me. But last year everything was completely different, and it’s not about the characteristics of the car, but about the new concept of aerodynamics. I’ve had to change my style of management very radically, although I find it difficult to explain. But it really wasn’t easy.

Every weekend the car behaved differently and I was just better able to adapt to it. I think a lot of it happens on a subconscious level. Probably the car will also be very different this year than last year, but I don’t know how big this difference will be.”