Lando Norris refused to entertain suggestions he had blown a chance to win the world championship immediately after Max Verstappen sealed last year’s championship. Red Bull may not have repeated its consistent dominance of previous seasons, he acknowledged, but it was still the team to beat, most notably at the beginning of the year.
But eventually Norris accepted he could have taken the title: “It was within reach,” he conceded earlier this month. He ended the season 73 points off Verstappen, and while there were plenty of missed chances to make up that deficit, it’s easy to exaggerate how big an opportunity Norris missed last year.
Particularly considering he started the season without a win to his name, and in a car which didn’t look likely to deliver one. By the time he got his hands on McLaren’s game-changing upgrade in Miami, Norris had picked up a couple of podium finishes, while Verstappen had won four times out of five.
After the Safety Car helped him to a breakthrough win in Miami, Norris marked himself out as Verstappen’s biggest threat for the title, though not always convincingly. Norris came a close second at Imola but slipped up after leading in the rain in Montreal and squandered pole position with a poor start in Spain. The latter became a running theme of his season.
Lando Norris
| Best | Worst | |
|---|---|---|
| GP start | 1 (x8) | 15 |
| GP finish | 1 (x4) | 20 |
| Points | 374 | |
At times it felt like Verstappen was the only one of the championship contenders who knew what he was fighting for and who he was up against. The Austrian Grand Prix weekend illustrated this clearly: Norris left the door open for Verstappen in the sprint race, throwing victory away, while the next day Verstappen defended his lead up to – and eventually over – the limit of legal defending.
From this point in the season Norris often had race-winning pace in the car, but too often missed chances to win or out-score Verstappen. His team copped most of the blame at Silverstone, but another sluggish getaway cost him in Hungary, and he had a poor day at Spa. Though he won dominantly in Verstappen’s backyard, once again Norris allowed his championship rival to beat him out of turn one.
Though Norris may be too soft on Verstappen on the track, he is invariably hard on himself out of the cockpit. But as the season went on he had less cause to be self-critical. In particular, he dialled out the kind of errors which previously dogged him in qualifying, and consistently strong starting positions helped him gather valuable points. In Azerbaijan, where he was enormously unlucky in qualifying, he fought back brilliantly in the race, passing Verstappen for a fine fourth place.
| Become a RaceFans supporter and
After comprehensively seeing Verstappen off in Singapore (despite two conspicuous errors) Norris clashed with his title rival again in the next two races. He was the architect of his own downfall in Austin, yet again losing a position to Verstappen at the start, but showed good awareness of his rival’s increasingly borderline tactics in Mexico to salvage a valuable second place.
Having lost the lead from pole to George Russell in Brazil, Norris regained the advantage when conditions reached their worst, but the timings of the Virtual Safety Car and red flag worked against him, and Verstappen’s win effectively ended the title fight. The Red Bull driver delivered the coup de grace in Las Vegas where McLaren endured a rare off-weekend.
However, after one of his few significant errors of the season in Qatar, Norris rebounded superbly in the finale, winning under pressure from the Ferrari drivers to secure the constructors’ championship for his team. If McLaren begin this year as strongly as they ended the last, it will be down to Norris to prove he knows how to deal with Verstappen.
RaceFans’ driver rankings are based partly on the scores awarded to drivers for their performances in each round as well as other factors.
Formula 1
Browse all Formula 1 articles
