Lando Norris believes that his McLaren Formula 1 team will head into the 2025 season knowing that it can fight for the title “from round one.”
This year the Woking team began to gain momentum after introducing an upgrade package in Miami, where Norris scored his maiden win.
Although he and team mate Oscar Piastri were competitive at most venues ultimately Norris was too far behind Max Verstappen to take the title fight beyond last weekend’s Las Vegas GP.
“I’m very proud of the whole team for putting up the fight for so long, for starting to catch up, and then catching up as much as we did,” he said when asked by this writer if he was proud of his season.”
“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. So 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 F1, my first three. No one else is there fighting him. It’s been me and it’s been McLaren. So I’m proud of what we’ve achieved.”
“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.”
Norris believes that he has proved to himself that he is a title contender, while admitting that he still has to make improvements.
“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 F1.”
“Many 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 20 years or 30 years that I fought such a driver.”
“I’m happy for him. He deserves the championship, but hopefully I can upset him more next year.”
He added: “I think if we had a better car at the beginning of the year, we would have been fighting him a lot more, and he would have been a lot more under pressure than he’s ever been. So I think we put him under pressure, as soon as we did, he made mistakes, and it showed.”
“The team made mistakes, he made some mistakes. But over the course of the season, that’s very few in terms of what he’s 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. And that’s always impressive to see. Always things to learn.”
Norris conceded that McLaren’s disappointing performance in the cool conditions in Las Vegas showed that the team has issues to address for next year’s MCL39.
“Clearly, we have a lot of work to do with our car,” he said. “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, and 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 have got anything more out of it. And if I tried, I would probably would have ended up in the wall somewhere.”
