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Lando Norris offered an intriguing insight into McLaren’s mindset this week as it bids to build on its Formula 1 constructors’ championship success.
Despite McLaren off the back of a 2024 season where it had exceeded its own expectations, the sense is very much that what it did last year would not be deemed good enough this time around.
In Norris’s own words, McLaren realises that it made life “difficult” for itself at times – so the motivation is very much about chasing an easier time in the campaign ahead.
“One thing the team is very good at is the knowledge of this [last season],” said Norris, speaking in a video interview with team sponsor Mastercard that was filmed at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
“They want to do it again. But it's not to get complacent now. That's what can happen very easily to a lot of athletes or anyone in the world, almost.
“Once things start to go well, you can easily relax, and it can drift away from you very quickly.
“One thing we've realised as a team is now we are there; we want to make it easy for ourselves.
"We want to keep going so that we can win these races easily, and not have them as difficult as what they were last year.”
An F1 2025 pipe dream?
Norris’s reference to chasing an easy life comes ahead of a campaign that looks too close to call – with McLaren, Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes all having reason to believe they can unleash what it takes to come out on top.
However, with F1’s car designs appearing to have got pretty close to the full potential of the current rules set, thinking that McLaren can find a big step with its car to leave its rivals’ in the dust is pretty unrealistic.
After all, Ferrari is being aggressive with changes on its 2025 car, Red Bull started to unlock more performance from its RB20 at the end of last year and Mercedes has faith that it can address the issues that held it back too.
The reality of how close things will be is something that McLaren team management accepted at the end of last year, when it said that just delivering a good step with the car was the bare minimum to even stand still.
That has been reinforced in comments team boss Andrea Stella made to the BBC recently, acknowledging that, while McLaren won, it was by the slimmest of margins.
“We have achieved the 2024 constructors' championship, but the performance advantage we had was 0.04% on average, and the points margin we had was 2%,” he said.
“Over 666 points in a season, these margins simply mean that if you don't do better next year, then you have to be ready to face a loss.
“We don't want to face a loss. We want to continue winning. Therefore, we need to raise the bar for the future."
The room for improvement
While dominating in pace terms is not likely, this is not to say that McLaren does not have room to make progress this year in its target of making life easier for itself.
The Race recently highlighted some specific areas where, if McLaren got rid of the mistakes that cost it in 2024, there was ground to do much better.
There were some strategic decisions that did not play out the way it hoped – perhaps most notably at Silverstone with tyre choices for both Oscar Piastri and Norris, and at Monza where it left the one-stop door open for Charles Leclerc to triumph.
There was also a lot of debate about whether McLaren should have been more robust in how it handled team orders between Norris and Piastri.
With a clear potential to win the drivers’ title from the middle phase of the campaign, a more cut throat approach in throwing weight behind Norris early on could have helped him win in Hungary and Italy.
But equally, the team had to consider the duty it had to Piastri and his side of the garage – and felt there was potential for longer term trouble if it reduced the Australian too early to a supporting role.
Doing the right thing on that front is a subjective matter, but what McLaren knows it did not get right was in being decisive and clear in what it expected from its drivers.
At Monza, for example, the murkiness over the pair of them racing ‘cleanly’ opened the door for what happened at the second chicane – which probably cost the team the win there.
Added on top of these factors is the aspect of Norris’s own performances too.
There were some obvious mistakes in the campaign – such as some poor starts like Spain and Hungary, or opening lap mistakes like in Belgium – that will need ironing out.
Then there is also the element of perhaps needing to be a bit more robust against Max Verstappen, who came out on top more often than not when it came to aggressive wheel-to-wheel battles.
Norris himself has accepted that he needs to lift his game if he is going to capture that drivers’ crown.
“I came close-ish last year, I was still always a bit far behind,” he said at Davos. “But…I could smell it, let's say. I had that feeling of like, ‘OK, this is kind of what it's like’. It was within reach.
“And this year I need to fix a few things, work on some things, and come back stronger. And that's what I'm ready to do.”
Reach for the stars
The desire to improve is obvious, and F1 teams these days are now too good to ever get complacent and think they can take their foot off the throttle and still come out on top.
Eras of dominance for Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes this century show that once teams get to the top, they normally stay there for a while.
While McLaren pushing to “win easily” may ultimately be a case of wishful thinking that has little chance of being achieved, the unprecedented level of competition in F1 these days means it is probably not a bad thing to overshoot with targets.
Teams have long lived by the mantra that in public it is better to under-promise and over-deliver.
But with the way F1 is right now, if you do not reach for the stars with your personal ambitions and instead aim too low, you will end up falling flat on your face on the ground.
