Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
The dust has settled over the Las Vegas strip, and Formula 1 became the 2024 world champion despite the best efforts of Land Norris. But, unfortunately, the season is over for the McLaren driver Max Verstappenhands from the beginning.
McLaren was not ready to fight for the title
While the Miami Grand Prix may seem like a very long time ago, the tone for the 2024 Formula 1 season was set in the five races leading up to the first American round of the season.
In those five races, Verstappen took four wins and once retired with a total of 110 points — more than a quarter of the 403 he earned in Las Vegas to win his fourth championship. Lando Norris, on the other hand, finished fifth overall in the title fight with just 58 points.
It was only in Miami where Norris took his first Formula 1 victory career that something like a “title fight” has begun. His McLaren team brought an extensive list of upgrades to the Miami International Circuit, and they worked much better than anyone expected.
But it was too late for Miami.
After the Las Vegas Grand Prix, McLaren team boss Andrea Stella took time to congratulate Max Verstappen before launching into his explanation of exactly where things went wrong.
“If you remove the first few races of the season before we deliver the Miami upgrade, then we will see that we have a trajectory in terms of the Drivers’ Championship that means Landa can compete with Max,” admitted Stella. “This is one of the unthinkable achievements that we have to positively acknowledge at McLaren, and when I say unthinkable, (I mean) thinking about where we were just 18 months ago.”
Speaking to the media after the race, Lando Norris made a similar point.
“I think if we had a better car at the start of the year we would have fought him a lot more and he would have been under a lot more pressure than ever,” he explained.
Despite having a 24-race F1 season, five races are still enough to set the tone for the rest of the championship. Red Bull started the year on extremely solid footing before any other team really got to grips with their 2024 package. And that was enough.
Lando Norris is still evolving
Norris has been in F1 since 2019, but he’s still develops as a participant of the championship. This is in no way an indictment of Norris; McLaren simply didn’t have the equipment to allow its drivers to fight for wins, and as a result, Norris was primarily taught to fight for race finishes, or perhaps points, no for the championship.
In the past, Norris’ best championship finish was sixth in both 2021 and 2023 – and on both occasions he was in the thick of a tight points race where there was potentially huge reward for making a brave move and finishing, say, eighth in racing instead of ninth.
But the “finish as many points as possible at all costs” mindset is not a championship winning mindset. To win the title, your every move must be weighted with greater benefit. Should you try a bold strategy and try to undercut the competition? If you’re just trying to finish in the points, this strategy makes sense. If you’re already in the top three, you might as well give up a great score in hopes of finishing a little better.
However, there is ample evidence that Norris has grown significantly this year.
“Formula 1 drivers (…) need to work on self-awareness,” Andrea Stella told the media after the race. “Like, what am I good at? What can’t I do? What should I consolidate? What should I develop? What (do) do I really need to learn?
“And with Lando, I think this year more than any other year, we developed that point of view, that self-awareness. I think Lando has become not only more knowledgeable, but also more able to use his skills or develop new skills.”
Stella gave several examples. Back in Austria, Norris collided with Verstappen as he tried to steal the lead from Red Bull. Both drivers lost positions, but while Verstappen was able to rally and finish fifth, Norris eventually retired. What could have been an impressive scoring day turned into a disaster.
But look at Norris’ behavior at the track in Austin and Mexico, where he battled hard with Verstappen but not enough to make contact, and you have a very different story: that of a driver who found out.
Stella added, “I think with Lando, I’m not sure it’s recognized enough on the outside, for some reason; more of an admission of missed opportunities rather than an admission that Landa is on an extremely strong trajectory and was in a position – once McLaren offered race-winning material – to keep Verstappen’s pace.”
Max Verstappen what Good
Over and over in the post-race media scrum, drivers and team principals reiterated one critical point: Max Verstappen is just a damn good driver, and even on his worst days, he’s still better than the others.
“He hasn’t put a foot wrong, really, all year,” Norris said of his title rival. “That’s his strong point: he has no downsides, he has no downsides.
“When he had the fastest car, he dominated the races. If he’s not in the fastest car, he’s still coming up behind us and almost winning races anyway. So he just didn’t have a bad side. He didn’t have a single bad race all year. So he just drove the way Max always drove, which is perfect.”
Norris noted that when Verstappen finished a race, he always did so in a strong points position, with his lowest results being three sixth places. That’s not to say the McLaren driver didn’t do well – Norris’ worst finish (if he wasn’t damaged in a collision) was eighth. It’s just that his three wins still pale in comparison to Verstappen’s eight.
Red Bull team boss Christian Horner praised his driver after the race, noting that this championship was sweeter and more difficult than his first in 2021. And it comes down to the pilot.
“Max, when you look back at the season as a whole and you think back to the races he won at Imola, Barcelona and Montreal, they were all very hard-fought races,” Horner said. “In the summer months, when we struggled a bit with the car, he was still second at Silverstone, second at Zandvoort. He was still climbing the podiums and achieving results, and behind the scenes he was putting in a huge effort with the engineers, designers and in the gym – more than in any previous year.”
It was a performance, Horner said, that should cement Verstappen’s name on the list of F1 greats. And when you look at how Verstappen was able to turn even the worst day into something positive, well, championships aren’t won on the best of days. They won at your worst. Verstappen did everything in his power to ensure that the ‘worst’ result was still desirable for the rest of the grid.
Are we in for an exciting 2025?
McLaren certainly thinks so.
“Participating in this quest, I think we learned a lot,” Andrea Stella reflected after the race. “We studied as a team. We learned how to win races. We’ve also learned that sometimes when you’re competing to win races you have to change your approach to racing – and certainly this season we’ve had some situations like Canada, Silverstone where we could have won the race and we’ve got important of science as a team.”
Norris echoed similar sentiments, saying, “I’m so proud of the whole team for fighting so long to start catching up and catching up as much as we did. At the beginning of the year, we were the fourth team. Red Bull has never been the fourth best team. So we had too much of a deficit to catch up from the start of the season and we couldn’t because they are still too strong.”
But both Stella and Norris had one main takeaway: they are proud that of all the teams and riders on the grid, they are there were those capable of “giving Verstappen a headache.”
“I don’t think there’s any disappointment today,” Stella told the media. “I think there are still many reasons to be proud and happy and to somehow cheer up for the future. I think we are going into the future with optimism and a positive attitude.”
Norris added: “Next year we start the season with a car that we believe we can win the championship with from the first round, and we haven’t been able to do that for the last six years.”
There are two races left in the 2024 season, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, but 2025 is fast approaching. I would like to stay tuned because it is already an exciting year.
Have a tip? Email us at tips@thedrive.com
