‘Hard not to do a better job than I did at the start of the year’ – Norris

Lando Norris says his improvement in form during the season is partly because he performed so poorly early in the year.

The world championship leader won the season-opening race in Australia but had to wait seven rounds to score his next victory. His team mate Oscar Piastri won four of the intervening rounds, opening up a points lead Norris has only recently overturned.

Norris has enjoyed a stronger run of late, winning the last two rounds and reaching the podium in five of the last six.

He said part of the improvement has come due to changes on the car, including the front suspension revision McLaren introduced at the Canadian Grand Prix in June.

“It’s hard not to do a better job than what I was doing at the beginning of the season,” said Norris. “I certainly struggled at the beginning of the year.

“We’ve changed some little things on the car that we think – not all of them are even guarantees, we’ve spoken about that in previous races and stuff, the things with the front suspension and steering – some of it is we think it’s better, we think it’s going to help us, and help me. But it’s not a guarantee.

“So that’s helped at times and even when we put it on, it wasn’t like, ‘oh, this feels way better’. It was more like [they said] ‘we think it’s better, if you don’t feel anything, we’ll just leave it on because we think it’s better’. The rest of it is more up to me just trying to figure it out myself, and with the group of people that I have around me – my engineers, my full team.”

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Qualifying was a particular weakness for Norris early in the year, as he often failed to replicate his best laps in Q3. However he feels has improved his performance across many areas.

“I certainly feel like I’m doing a much better job,” he said. “I’m executing laps better in qualifying and performing very well in the races, good starts, good restarts, all of that. The smaller things, let’s say. So I’m definitely doing a better job, but it’s not come without the work behind it all.”

Making these gains has been down to “a constant amount of work that I do with my team to always keep finding little things,” said Norris.

“It’s not like I’ve gone out [and realised] this is how the car needs to be driven. I still struggle now. One weekend to the next, it changes. Mexico, Austin, completely different feelings. To Brazil again, completely different feelings.

“So it’s not like you figure it out and then everything’s easy. I still, every weekend, just have to adapt a lot to how the car wants to be driven.

“But there was never [just] one thing. It’s just a lot of things that I’ve been doing on the simulator. I’ve been spending time with my team on on trying to figure out and adapt to having better procedures of working through in FP1, FP2, FP3 to try and understand more about the car and understand the way it needs to be driven.

“So I’ve just had to step up more than ever in terms of my work ethic, my understanding of all of these things, get more out of the people around me and [have] them get more out of me at the same time and just work more than I ever have done before.”

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