McLaren F1 team ready to help Norris stop being so harsh on himself

Norris ended the campaign berating the “shit job” he had made of qualifying shootouts. This followed a slide in Abu Dhabi that denied him the chance to nick pole off Max Verstappen. The Briton was similarly self-critical of his one-lap performances in Austin and Mexico City.

This has led McLaren to consider ways to support Norris, such as replicating the “entourage” given to help tennis players or letting Norris target consistency rather than perfection.

Asked by Motorsport.com whether McLaren should intervene to help Norris kerb any mistakes, team principal Andrea Stella said: “It's about how you judge situations, it's about how you talk about situations, about how you interpret yourself. This one certainly deserves some attention.

“How can we just sometimes accept that a 99.9% lap is good enough? What are you up against? Always the 100% or consistency?

“When you look into opportunities with drivers, with the athletes at this level, you do it as a group. You do it 360 degrees around the driver.

“You can see in tennis, these players, they have an entourage around them, which is to support this incredible performance to actually deliver to the best of their potential.”

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

Lando Norris, McLaren

Amid the driver errors, McLaren is working to assess whether major in-season upgrades that turned the MCL60 into a car capable of challenging Red Bull have also introduced tricky handling traits.

But Stella added that Norris was nevertheless “very harsh on himself”. He continued: “Certainly, even the way he addresses his own performance I think deserves attention because he just seems very harsh on himself.

“Sometimes we need to focus on the positives. There's quite a lot of positives and we need to make sure that we look into that, and we make the negatives in a way be functional to perform, not simply to punish yourself.”

It was also put to Stella that the impressive rookie campaign from Oscar Piastri had increased the pressure on Norris to lead to mistakes.

Addressing the team-mate relationship, the Italian said: “Because you have a competitive team-mate, you can see how you can go quicker in some places.

“We need to make sure that we support our drivers, extract their potential, which is something that is just continuous improvement.

“You do have to use all the information, including looking at trends during qualifying, like what happens when at the point we make a mistake, under which circumstances did we do that?

“Is there something that can be improved technically, but is there something that can be improved from the human side?

“So definitely we know that when the team-mate is strong, the second element [errors] tends to be more prevalent. So, something definitely to think about.”