GOING UP…

Though

it’s just a handful of months since GP Racing last sat down to talk to Lando Norris, so much has changed in the interim. Who could have predicted, at the beginning of the season, that Norris’s highly rated new team-mate Daniel Ricciardo, a multiple grand prix winner no less, would take so long to master McLaren’s capricious MCL35M – and that it would be Norris, the youngster with the well-documented confidence issues, who would lay on the swagger?

With a new technical format beckoning, 2021 was always going to be about making do as teams pivoted development resources early to gain an advantage in the era to come. For McLaren’s drivers that meant making the best of a difficult car with a particular set of characteristics that made it a potential winner at some tracks and virtually undriveable at others. Ricciardo’s journey was the most obviously troubled – as he explained in GP Racing last month, he had to revise his entire driving style – although he delivered a fine victory on one of those good days for the MCL35M, at Monza.

Had the cards fallen slightly differently that victory might have gone to Norris. Two weeks earlier, in Belgium, he’d looked to be a prime candidate for pole position on a perilously wet Spa-Francorchamps circuit before spinning heavily into the barriers. A fortnight after completing that McLaren 1-2 in Italy, Norris dominated the Russian Grand Prix from pole position and should have won, only to make the wrong call on