McLaren: Norris needs to be more consistent – we can challenge again

Team principal Andrea Stella believes team can step up and become leading challengers to Red Bull

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has challenged Lando Norris to be “more consistent” this season as he believes the Woking team will be competing at the front of the field once again.
McLaren were the surprise package of 2023, delivering a massive step in performance midseason. From Austria onwards, only Red Bull’s triple world champion Max Verstappen won more points than Norris.
Stella, though, said the 24 year-old Briton still had plenty of room for improvement.
Norris, who is famously hard on himself, made a number of errors over the course of the year with Stella challenging him to match Verstappen’s metronomic consistency if he wants to take the next step in his career.
“Last year was definitely a strong season for Lando,” the Italian said after showing off McLaren’s 2024 car livery. “If we take a look at the numbers, from Austria onwards, I think Lando was the second highest scorer behind Max. So this reflects his quality and what he is capable of as a Formula One driver, which puts him at the top of the grid.
“At the same time, opportunities are available. We had some setbacks, like the [crash] in qualifying in Saudi that came a little out of the blue really.
“I think when you deal with champions, with delivering at such a high level…you need to be at the top consistently. That’s what makes the difference.
“It’s not really the top potential. This is, especially for Lando, almost unexplored as to how good he is. Sometimes he surprises us with some of the performances he can put together. Think about the pole position in the sprint in Brazil, after he had lost the two or three tenths in the first sector. How did he manage to put it on pole in the other five corners? That was just amazing.
“But consistency in this kind of delivery is what makes the difference. And I think Max is really establishing new standards in terms of how consistently you can perform strongly.”
Stella added that he was confident the team could continue their upwards trajectory in 2024, saying they were not yet finding it to be a case of “diminishing returns” as they go deeper into this set of regulations.
The arrival at the start of the year of engineers Rob Marshall from Red Bull and David Sanchez from Ferrari was a major boon, he said. As was the fact that this year’s car has been developed on site in the team’s new wind tunnel and simulator.
2024 McLaren livery: LAUNCHED! 🚀 Introducing our new look for the 2024 F1 season! #WhateverItTakes pic.twitter.com/n1nk6ImG5I
“Hopefully all of these ingredients will combine to make our team more competitive, and deliver a better car than last year’s,” Stella said. “So far, I have to say, we don’t see diminishing returns. This obviously will have to be proven once we put the car on the ground. But when it comes to the wind tunnel development and the CFD development, we see that the gradient we established last year that led to the Austria development, and then the Singapore development… it seems like we can maintain it.”
McLaren chief executive Zak Brown said he was “feeling confident” ahead of the new season, which begins in Bahrain on March 2. Although he cautioned that Red Bull, who could afford to stop developing last year’s car midseason as they had such a big advantage, would most likely still have a big gap.
Brown again implored governing body the FIA to look closely at Red Bull’s relationship with AlphaTauri, saying it was unfair in the modern era for one company to own two teams.
“They [AlphaTauri] are moving, as far as I understand it, to the UK, which I think will benefit both teams,” Brown said. “When the rules [on ownership] were put in place, the sport was in a different place. We had a huge gap between teams like ourselves with huge budgets, and smaller teams. Now everybody’s pretty much at the [limit of the budget] cap. So I think everyone’s playing with the same size bat to use a baseball term. That’s a serious issue for the fairness of the sport, for the fans. That’s why it’s pretty much not allowed in any other form of major sport.”