(Motorsports news) In that same year, Norris made his Formula One debut with McLaren, a team he has stuck with since agreeing to two more contract extensions in 2021 and 2022. Despite a challenging start to the season, the Papaya team’s development work allowed it to progress from struggling to avoid qualifying to consistently being Red Bull’s closest rival. This helped Norris secure a career-high seven podium finishes and lead the early stages of the races in Austin and Silverstone.
In an exclusive interview with Motorsport.com, Norris was asked to rank his own 2023 season, to which he responded, “I think it’s been my best year.” As a team, I believe this has been our best year ever. I suppose a lot of it is just for the apparent reasons—the success we’ve been able to achieve since our initial start. “I believe there have been many outstanding performances, both in terms of blazing through and turning in some solid ones. Probably the high point of all of that was Mexico when Norris moved up from 17th to 5th with a string of spectacular overtakes around a poor getaway at the second start.
In 2023, Norris had the “ability to understand how to drive the car, where are we with the tyres, what these changes of conditions mean, how he should adapt my driving style”, which helped McLaren stick closer to Verstappen in races than many of its competitors at certain points during the previous season. After hearing these remarks, Norris clarified that, despite this, he feels as though “I still have to adapt every weekend” in order to strive for the best race results in the crucial area of tyre management on the brittle Pirelli tires.
“I still don’t feel very comfortable thinking that the car will do this this weekend, and it does that every weekend—half the time, it doesn’t,” he continued. “After that, I feel like, ‘Okay, I need to drive it a little more like this,’ and all these other things. I believe Formula 1 is frequently and always evaluated too quickly. When a driver enjoys two consecutive successful weekends, people assume he is back. However, it disappears again and is reversed the following weekend.
“Well, I believe I’ve always had a few strong races here and there, but when I consider the season as a whole, I was performing much better on Sundays out of all of these races and could always kind of make the most of any circumstance I was in. Regardless of the weather, whether it was hot or cold, whether the car was incredibly quick or battled a bit more, whether the setup was where I wanted it or wasn’t, and whether I started at the front or the rear,
And I believe that’s what I’ve done better this year. Norris attributed his development to “time and effort put into it,” which he described as “a lot of simulator stuff, a lot of data, and”learning”—reviewing his prior results as well as those of the other McLaren drivers while he was a member of the team. “I won’t reveal the mysteries behind it or anything like that; the main thing is probably a lot of simulators,” he remarked.
The data against me and Daniel Ricciardo, 2021–2022, Oscar Piastri, 2023–2023, and even me and Carlos Sainz, 2019–2020, will also need to be examined. It was able to adjust to each of these many situations even more and different conditions that challenge you.” We went back that far to sort of grasp what he was doing, what I was doing, and what Daniel and Oscar were doing at the time. Basically, just work.”
