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For a brief moment in the French Grand Prix, Lando Norris was in a very unusual position: out of the points.
Since Max Verstappen crashed out of the Azerbaijan GP and Lewis Hamilton skated down the Turn 1 escape road, Norris has been left standing as the only driver in the 2021 Formula 1 season with a 100% point-scoring record.
There was such a long way to go in Sunday’s race in France when Norris tumbled out of the top 10 on the opening lap that it would have been very, very premature to think his run might come to an end.
In the end, Sunday’s French GP proved a perfect case study of why this unique record still stands.
Norris fell from eighth to 11th on lap one, as a good initial launch gave way to a curious upshift into second gear that triggered a lot of wheelspin.
Out of position on the run to Turn 1, Norris was swallowed up by team-mate Daniel Ricciardo and the Alpines of Fernando Alonso and Esteban Ocon.
But by the end of the race he’d cross the line fifth – his sixth top-five finish in seven races. Somehow, he and McLaren had conspired yet again to turn an unspectacular situation into a major haul. During his charge in the second stint, it looked like Norris was in a different race to his rivals.
“With everything we have seen so far from him, it just shows that he made a big step forward this year,” McLaren F1 boss Andreas Seidl says when asked by The Race what we should interpret from Norris’s 100% record.
“And what is simply great to see even after qualifying maybe not going to the plan or after a start that doesn’t go to plan, he keeps the overview, stays calm.
“He knows his opportunities are coming, he manages the tyres when he has to and then he uses the potential which is there when the opportunities come up in the race.
“That’s really great to see how he grew into this in the last two and a half of years.”
The fact that Norris has kept his streak going is a nice sub-plot in his season.
Along with his fourth place in the drivers’ championship – ahead of Mercedes’ Valtteri Bottas! – it’s a lovely symbol of his own strength and also the McLaren assets.
The key to Norris’s end result in France was, after a couple of opportunistic moves to gain some ground including a sweet pass on Alonso on the run to Beausset, the extended first stint in which he barely lost any time to those who had stopped for hard tyres early.
“We want life here, rather than pace,” was the instruction after his immediate rivals all pitted.
Eking out the mediums longer than anyone except renowned tyre whisperer Sergio Perez, and doing so at a decent pace in the circumstances meant when Norris rejoined he was not that far behind everybody: Leclerc, Ricciardo, Sainz and Gasly.
But he also had a healthy tyre offset: 10 laps on Leclerc, eight on Ricciardo and seven on Sainz and Gasly.
And within 10 laps he’d passed the lot – picking off one after the other, including Ricciardo, who he’d had a brief irritation with way back on lap two on after going wide trying to pass him around the outside at Turn 1.
“I just had eight or nine laps of just being so slow and struggling with the tyres at the end of the first stint, and it felt really bad,” Norris said.
“But coming out I was still very close to them. I had clean air at the end of the first stint, they were battling a lot and so on and they used a lot of the tyres. So when I came out with fresh tyres and clean air and everything I could push and pass them quite easily.
“The team did a really good job. And I feel like I did a good job with the tyre saving and the strategy. And that’s what made it all work.”
Norris is becoming a very shrewd operator in F1’s midfield, capable of picking moments to push with increasingly good judgement and able to turn on overtakes and race-defining pace almost at will.
There were a couple of slight hiccups – the failed Ricciardo move at Turn 1 on the second lap, and an aggressive rebuff from Gasly at Beausset in the second stint – but both the result of unyielding opposition more than misplaced aggression from Norris.
But as impressive as he has been, Seidl also points out that Norris “scoring each race also means obviously that the team is doing a great job in terms of reliability, in terms of race strategy, in terms of pitstops and I’m obviously very happy with what I’m seeing there”.
McLaren’s role should not be underestimated. Norris’s record says as much about the team as it does him. It indicates that it above all others outside of Mercedes and Red Bull is F1’s most dependable team at the moment.
It is clear, as explored in this piece, that Norris is benefitting from F1’s third-best car on Sundays – at least, the most consistently third-best car on Sundays.
The MCL35M clearly has some sweet traits that allow its drivers to make up for track position deficits. It’s quick in a straight line and kind on its tyres, which makes it a good weapon for overtaking – as both Norris and Ricciardo showed in France – and also a sharp tool to fight with strategically. Race pace in clear air is clearly not shabby either.
And McLaren’s clearly operating well as a race team, picking its moments strategically (extending Norris’s stint in France, for example) and improving in key areas like the pitstops, which have been a lingering recent weakness.
It’s such a potent combination means that even Paul Ricard, with its penchant for processional races, and a loss of track position couldn’t condemn Norris and McLaren to a lacklustre Sunday.
Norris’s 100% record is a testament to his own growth as a driver and speaks volumes for McLaren as well.
It’s an indicator of the many qualities that make McLaren so competitive (even when its car is sometimes lacking outright performance) and allow Norris to go from strength-to-strength.
