Lando Norris Was Never Going To Take the F1 Title from Max Verstappen

McLaren put up a good fight, but the 2024 F1 season was always going to be Verstappen's.
SAO PAULO, BRAZIL - NOVEMBER 02: Sprint winner Lando Norris of Great Britain and McLaren and Third placed Max Verstappen of the Netherlands and Oracle Red Bull Racing, later demoted to 4th placed, attend the press conference after the Sprint ahead of the F1 Grand Prix of Brazil at Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace on November 02, 2024 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. (Photo by Lars Baron/Getty Images)
Lars Baron

Share

The dust has settled over the Las Vegas strip, and Formula 1 has crowned its 2024 World Champion—despite Lando Norris’ best efforts. But unfortunately for the McLaren driver, the season was in Max Verstappen‘s hands right from the very start.

McLaren Wasn’t Ready to Fight for a Title

While the Miami Grand Prix may feel like it took place a formidable life age ago, the tone for the 2024 Formula 1 season had been set in the five races preceding the first American round of the season.

Within those five races, Verstappen took four wins and retired once, amassing a total of 110 points—over a quarter of the 403 he secured in Las Vegas to win his fourth championship. Lando Norris, by contrast, had settled into fifth overall in the title fight, with a mere 58 points.

It was only in Miami, where Norris took the first win of his Formula 1 career, that anything amounting to a “title fight” kicked off. His McLaren team had brought a comprehensive slate of upgrades to the Miami International Autodrome, and they worked much better than anyone had anticipated. 

But by Miami, it was already too late.

After the Las Vegas Grand Prix, McLaren team boss Andrea Stella took a moment to congratulate Max Verstappen before launching into his explanation of where, exactly, things went awry.

“If you remove the first few races of the season before we deliver Miami upgrades, then we see that we have a trajectory from a Drivers’ Championship point of view that means Lando could compete with Max,” Stella acknowledged. “This is one of the unthinkable achievements that we have to positively acknowledge at McLaren—and when I say unthinkable, [I mean] thinking of where we were only 18 months ago.”

Speaking to media after the race, Lando Norris made a similar point.

“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,” he explained.

Despite F1’s 24-race season, five races are still enough to set the tone for the remainder of the championship. Red Bull kicked off the year on extremely solid footing before any other team had truly sorted out its 2024 package. And that was enough.

Lando Norris Is Still Evolving

Norris has been racing in Formula 1 since 2019, but he’s still evolving as a championship competitor. This isn’t an indictment of Norris by any means; McLaren simply has not had the machinery available to allow its drivers to compete for wins, and as a result, Norris has primarily learned how to battle for a race finish or maybe points, not for a championship.

In the past, Norris’ best finishing position in the championship was sixth place back in both 2021 and 2023—and in both instances, he was in the thick of a tight points battle where there was potentially a huge reward for making a gutsy move and finishing, say, eighth in a race instead of ninth.

But a “finish with as many points, at all costs” mindset is not a championship-winning mindset. To win a title, your every move must be weighed against the greater good. Should I try a gutsy strategy and try to undercut the competition? If you’re just trying to finish in the points, that strategy makes sense. If you’re in the top three already, you could very well be throwing away a great points-scoring day in hopes of finishing just a little bit better.

Still, there’s ample evidence that Norris has grown massively this year.

“Formula 1 drivers […] need to work on self-awareness,” Andrea Stella told media after the race. “Like, what am I good at? What am I not good at? What should I consolidate? What should I develop? What [do] I really need to learn? 

“And with Lando, I think this year more than any other year, we have developed this point of view, the self-consciousness. I think Lando became not only more aware but more capable of using his skills or developing new skills.”

Stella pointed out several examples. Back in Austria, Norris collided with Verstappen as he tried to steal the lead from Red Bull. Both drivers lost positions—but while Verstappen was able to rally for a fifth-place finish, Norris ultimately retired. What could have been an impressive points-scoring day turned into a disaster.

But look at Norris’ on-track behavior in Austin and Mexico, where he raced Verstappen hard but not so hard as to make contact, and you have a much different story: The story of a driver who learned.

Stella added, “I think with Lando, I’m not sure this is acknowledged enough externally, for some reasons; the more acknowledgment [is] towards what are the missed opportunities rather than recognizing that Lando is on an extremely strong trajectory, and he was in a condition—once McLaren offered material that can win races—to keep the pace of Verstappen.”

Max Verstappen Is That Good

Over and over again in the post-race media scrum, drivers and team principals reiterated one critical point: Max Verstappen is just a damn good driver, and even on his worst days, he’s still better than most.

“He’s not put a foot wrong, really, the whole year,” Norris said of his title rival. “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 races anyway. So he’s just not had a bad side to him. He’s not had any bad races the whole year. So he just drove as Max has always driven, which is perfectly.”

Norris pointed out that, when Verstappen finished races, he always did it in a solid points-scoring position, with his lowest results being three sixth-place finishes. This isn’t to say that the McLaren driver performed poorly—Norris’ worst finish (when he didn’t suffer collision damage) was eighth. It’s just that his three wins still paled in comparison to Verstappen’s eight.

Christian Horner, Red Bull’s team boss, praised his driver after the race, noting that this championship was sweeter and harder fought than his first in 2021. And that comes down to the driver.

“Max, when you look back at the season as a whole, and you think back to the races he won in Imola and Barcelona and Montreal—they were all very tough, closely-fought races,” Horner said. “In the summer months when we were struggling a bit with the car, he was still second in Silverstone, second in Zandvoort. He was still picking up podiums and results, and behind the scenes was putting a massive amount of effort in with the engineers and designers and on the simulator—more than in any previous year.”

It was a performance, Horner said, that should cement Verstappen’s name among the list of the greats in F1. And when you look at the way Verstappen was able to transform even the worst day into something positive, well—championships aren’t won on your best days. They’re won on your worst. Verstappen did everything in his power to guarantee that “worst” was still a result the rest of the grid would have craved. 

Are We in for an Exciting 2025?

McLaren certainly seems to think so.

“While being part of this quest, I think we have learned many things,” Andrea Stella mused after the race. “We have learned as a team. We have learned how to win races. We have also learned that sometimes, competing to win races, you need to adjust the way you approach racing—and definitely this season, we had some situations like Canada, Silverstone, in which we could have won the race, and we got important learning as a team.”

Norris echoed a similar sentiment, saying, “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, 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.”

SINGAPORE, SINGAPORE - SEPTEMBER 22: Race winner Lando Norris of Great Britain and McLaren and McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella celebrate their win after the F1 Grand Prix of Singapore at Marina Bay Street Circuit on September 22, 2024 in Singapore, Singapore. (Photo by Clive Rose - Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images)
Getty Clive Rose – Formula 1

But both Stella and Norris had one primary takeaway: They’re proud that, of all the teams and drivers on the grid, they were the ones capable of “giving Verstappen a headache.”

“I don’t think there’s a disappointment today,” Stella told media. “I think there’s many more reasons to be proud and to be happy and to be somehow encouraged for the future. I think we go into the future with optimism and with a positive feeling.”

Norris added, “Next year we go into a 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.”

There are still two races remaining in the 2024 season—Qatar and Abu Dhabi—but 2025 is coming up quickly. I’d stay tuned because it’s already shaping up to be an exciting year.

Got a tip? Email us at tips@thedrive.com