Lando Norris has praise for Max Verstappen despite losing the F1 title as he and Andrea Stella sees the positives from the fight going into 2025.
After the good run since the Miami race, McLaren put itself in a good spot on the constructors’ side where it sits in the lead ahead of Ferrari and Red Bull. It was an outside chance on the drivers’ side where Verstappen had a steady lead despite the inroads made by Norris.
The team started to thing serious about the drivers’ after taking the lead in the constructors’, but that step was in vain. The Brazil win for Verstappen more or less sealed the fate of Norris. The first chance the Dutchman got in Las Vegas, he took it and secured the fourth title on the bounce.
McLaren’s lack of pace due to front limitation in the colder conditions in Las Vegas proved to be too much for the team and Norris, which disallowed them to take the fight into Qatar and or even Abu Dhabi. But they are looking at the positives especially how they started the season.
Both Norris and Stella feel good about their season despite some off moments. They gave a fight to Red Bull and Verstappen, where they could seal the constructors’ title if they can hold off Ferrari. They are banking on the step up for a better show in 2025 when they can challenge from the get go.
Verstappen’s title –
Norris: “My thoughts are fine. “He’s deserved it. He’s not put a foot wrong really the whole year. That’s a strength of his. He has no downsides. He has no negatives. When he’s had the quickest car, he dominated races. When he’s not in the quickest car, he’s still been just behind us and almost winning the races anyway. He’s just not had a bad side to him. He’s not had a bad race. I think his worst race was probably Budapest… He still finished fifth. He’s just drove as Max has always driven which is perfectly and can’t fault him in anyway.”
Stella: “I think definitely at the end of this weekend in Vegas even as a team we want to spend a few words for Max. Let me express my congratulations to Max Verstappen, four World Championships in a row, and I think this title confirms that Max is one of the best drivers in the history of Formula 1. And it’s almost an important one for him because possibly in the past like last year people might have thought that it’s easy to win races when you have the best car.
“But it’s never easy to win so consistently like there’s always so many reasons why things can go wrong. I think already last year they were operating driver and team at very high level, but this year when often he didn’t have the best car what he could extract from weekends in which he didn’t have the best material confirms that we are in the era of Max Verstappen in these few last years and he deserves what he is achieving.”
Learning from Verstappen, season –
Norris: “Some of it’s experience. I think he’s still had a relatively easy season. I think if we had a better car at the beginning of the year, we would have been fighting him a lot more. He would have been under pressure a lot more pressure than he’s ever been. I think we put him under pressure and as soon as we did, he made mistakes. It showed, the team made mistakes but over the course of the season, that’s few in terms of what he has done and that’s what makes him so good. He’s not had a bad qualifying, he’s not had a bad race. I think his worst race was probably Budapest or something and he still finished fifth. He just gets everything out of the car every time. It’s always impressive to see. There’s always things to learn. I take a lot more positives than negatives… that’s for sure.
“I feel like I can fight for a championship and I’m happy and I can say that confidently. I have what it takes, and I know that deep down that I have what it takes. I have some things to work on still, for sure, but I can fight against Max, and I’ll be happy to say that, because I think Max is the best driver in the world, and probably one of the best drivers that’s ever been in Formula 1. Some people might disagree, but I’m quite confident when I say that, which is rare. So for me to put up a fight against him and to go wheel to wheel is something I love, I enjoy. I’ll probably look back on a lot in twenty or thirty years that I fought such a driver. So you know, I’m happy for him. He deserves the championship, but hopefully I can upset him more next year.”
McLaren show –
Norris: “I’m very proud of the whole team for putting up the fight for so long, for starting to catch up and catching up as much as we did. We were the fourth-best team at the beginning of the year. Red Bull have never been the fourth-best team or worst, let’s say, ever. We had just too big of a deficit to catch up from the beginning of the season, and we could not, because they’ve been too strong still. Next year, we’ll go into the season with a car we think we can win a championship with from round one, and we’ve not been able to do that for the last six years, so I’m excited for that. But I’m proud of what we’ve achieved. My first win in Formula 1, my first three [wins], no one else is there fighting him. It’s been me and it’s been McLaren. Could we have done some things better? Absolutely. Do I think we could have won the championship even with a perfect season?
“I don’t. So I’m happy to finish second still. I don’t think of those things [Mercedes beating Ferrari], I think of how bad our car was today. That’s what worries me, not Mercedes being strong. It was how poor we’ve been all weekend. Clearly, we have a lot of work to do with our car. It’s too difficult to drive. It doesn’t work in these conditions. It doesn’t work in many other tracks where we’ve had similar conditions, but we’ve been able to get everything out of it sometimes, even when people think we’ve had the best car, we’ve absolutely not. We still won some of those races, and those were the great weekends. But this weekend, even if I feel like I drove pretty well, I couldn’t get anything more out of it, and if I tried, I would probably end up in the wall somewhere.”
Stella: “This leads to talk about what we are achieving as well, because if we remove the first few races of the season, before we deliver the Miami upgrades, then we a trajectory from a drivers’ championship point of view. That means that Lando could compete with Max. This is one of the unthinkable achievements that we have to possibly acknowledge at McLaren. I am saying unthinkable by thinking about where we were about 18 months ago. At the same time, while being part of this quest, I think we have learnt many things, we have learnt as a team, we have learnt how to win races, we have also learnt that sometimes competing to win races, you have to adjust the way you approach racing and definitely this season we have situations like the kind in Silverstone, in which we could have won the race or Monza, where we got important learning as a team.
“If we look at Lando’s adaptations, competing even wheel-to-wheel with Max, I think from where he was in Austria to where he was in Austin and just the week after in Mexico, he learnt so quickly. I am very proud how Lando is rapidly picking up from the situations that he experiences on track and to some extent even off track, to become a better and better driver, I think with Lando I am not sure it is acknowledged enough externally. For some reasons, the more acknowledged are some of the missed opportunities rather than recognising that Lando is an extremely strong trajectory and he was in condition once McLaren offered material that can win races to keep the pace of Verstappen. And obviously, we are working hard with Oscar and we are using him in some of the learning with Lando, to transfer on to Oscar because you want to be in condition in 2025 to compete for the drivers’ championship with two drivers, Lando and Oscar.”
Here’s post-race moment: https://x.com/F1/status/1860632739134701950
Here’s how F1 Las Vegas GP panned out
Here’s link to a F1 Discord channel, join in to interact
