Let’s play a quick game of Name That Driver Season, shall we? I won 4 races in a 21 race calendar, I got 5 pole positions, came second in the Championship, was driving the Constructors Championship winning car, and finished more than 50 and less than 100 points behind the title winner. Who am I? Valtteri Bottas in 2019.
It’s close to, but not quite, the situation Lando Norris finds himself in this year through 22 races. Lando has 3 wins and 7 poles in 22 races, he’s in the Constructors Championship leader, and got eliminated with two full rounds left, including a sprint. It’s a decent, but by no means perfect, comparison, because there’s something very different about Lando than about Valtteri – at least Bottas lost in the same machinery, not a better car.
In the aftermath of Vegas and Lando’s elimination, there’s been a lot of discourse about Lando’s season, and whether it is, in fact, a success. He entered the season a 0 time race winner who had 1 career pole; he’s now a 3 time winner with 8 poles. Nominally, it’s a successful season. And yet, by any objective metric it’s a failure. And we need to reclaim a standard if we are to be honest about this season.
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Let’s be nice to Lando Norris and toss the first 5 races from existence, when Max managed to pull a 52 point gap despite DNF’ing in Australia. Since that point – a point at which the McLaren has had a car edge essentially every weekend – Lando Norris is losing the title by 11 points. Now, he’s likely to win the “Miami-And-After” title this year, as Qatar looks like it should suit the McLaren and Lando should claw back a haul of points, but regardless that’s not the point. Lando’s performances haven’t been good enough.
Let’s even hold Norris to the standard he held himself to in The Telegraph, claiming he’s had a “near perfect” season post summer break. He’s had 2 wins in 8 races so far since the break, which is better than his 1 win in 9 non-first five races pace from the first half of the season. He’s also had 5 pole positions, which is either a sign of success or an indictment. Lando converted two of those into wins, got a podium at Monza, and then failed to make the podium at his other two pole positions.
The idea that a “near perfect” run of form is failing to make the podium after pole positions twice is absurd. The idea that 3 wins in the fastest car on at least 12 weekends is good enough is absurd. The fact that he lost positions on Lap 1 in 6 of 7 races he’s had pole this season is unacceptable. George Russell has led Lap 1 after Lando poles more times than Lando has this season. How is any of this good enough?
For all the ink spilled about team orders (or the lack of them) this season, the 7 points in Hungary or the 3 in Monza are irrelevant. This was a title fight lost on merit – Norris hasn’t been good enough, even with the fastest car. That he finished 6th in Brazil – with Oscar giving up a place to facilitate it – is a great example. Yes, he got jumped by three cars not pitting and getting the red flag luck, but he should have at least been at the front of those that didn’t gamble and get lucky. He couldn’t keep the lead into Turn 1, he couldn’t keep the car on the road, and he lost to George and Charles.
He also failed to pass Max on track in two key situations. Whatever you think of Max’s driving standards in COTA or Austria, he didn’t get the moves done. Yes, Max is going to race to the very edge of the line, but when Russell and Verstappen went wheel to wheel in Spain or in Brazil, both in 2022, they managed to avoid crashing. Max pushed George wide in Brazil similarly to what happened to Lando, and George’s response was to change his angle and get by the Red Bull. Lando’s inability to do so matters, especially when in Austin Max was deemed clean.
But let’s go back to Valtteri, shall we, and the comparison that this column starts with. Does anybody consider that Valtteri season a success? Of course not. Does anybody consider Valtteri’s career a success? Of course not, because winning a few races in the fastest car and never seriously contending for a title isn’t an accomplishment we’ve ever really praised much.
And it’s especially rich for Lando and McLaren to pivot to praising his season, given Lando’s approach to Lewis’ record breaking 92nd win in 2020. “He’s in a car which should win every race, basically. He has to beat one or two other drivers, that’s it. Fair play to him, he’s still doing the job he has to do.” Well, you didn’t do the job. If you believe, as you clearly said then, that winning races is easy with the fastest car, why should we suddenly lower our standards for 3 wins in 16 races between Miami and Brazil?
The reason this matters, beyond fandom wars and point scoring on the internet, is that Lando Norris is being asked both to be judged by the standard of a serious title contender, and by the standards of a plucky outsider. He wants the credibility of being a top tier challenger, a future World Driver’s Champion taken seriously in the paddock and in the press. He and his fans want him to be taken seriously in the way that Charles is – where people speak in confident tones that he will put it together so day, despite a terrible pole conversion rate and never having been in a title race after summer break. Even George, his fellow Class of 2019 rookie, has had a hype machine since he took that 2020 Williams and put it into Q2s it didn’t belong in. Sakhir, and then Spa the next year, and then becoming the third ever person to beat Lewis over a full season in F1 (admittedly, with a healthy dose of luck), only added to it. Sebastian Vettel is on the record predicting the next WDC not named Lewis or Max is George. Lando’s never quite had that.
He’s always been positioned as a loveable underdog, and therefore benefitting from the expectations that creates. Lando’s 2022 was a great example of this – he got heaps of praise when he put in good to great performances (being the only one outside the Big 3 teams to get on the podium, coming P4 in Singapore), while ignoring the odd poor performance at the back of, or outside, the points. Now that he’s in a front running car, he’s trying to continue to be treated like a win is an incredibly amazing result, when it’s just not.
The honest truth is that Lando has put up a mediocre season, and that this should be a big sign of concern for his fans. Those who want to be honest about this season should look inward, and ask a very basic question; would George, Lewis, or Charles have lost points, net, to Max from Miami to Brazil if they were in Lando’s car? The answer, pretty obviously, is no. George is 4/4 lifetime in keeping leads after Lap 1 in F1. Charles has been sublime this season when Ferrari weren’t sacrificing his race with insane weather and tyre decisions, and has managed to win 2 races where Ferrari were not even in serious consideration prior to the weekend. And Lewis laid to rest a lot of concerns about his performance with that incredible Vegas drive, allaying concerns that his pace is gone and indicating that his pace returns when he actually has a good package underneath him.
Maybe none of those three win the title; after all, 52 points is a lot of points. But there is no universe where Lando did as good a job as possible. And we have to be honest about this, because as much as we should respect mental health, that cannot be a way of shutting down legitimate analysis of a sporting endeavour. Lando has botched this. And the thing is, it seems clear from where I’m sitting he knows it.
Max Verstappen won his first race in a Red Bull in a duel against Vettel because Nico and Lewis decided they weren’t going to yield. He then drove Danny Ric to Renault because he didn’t want to be a number 2, kicked Pierre and Alex’s asses comprehensively, and then won 4 titles in a row. George rocked up to Sakhir having never driven the Mercedes, put it on the front row, and then ate Valtteri’s lunch not once but twice on route to a win that was stolen from him by pit stop failures and a puncture. The next year, he put a Williams that was 8th at best on the grid and put it on the front row in Spa and P3 in Russia quali. Then he beat Lewis Hamilton over a season and is about to do it again, probably.
Lewis stepped into F1 teammates with the two time defending champion in a car that won zero races the year before and beat Fernando on route to P2 in the title and winning it the next year. Seb took a Toro Rosso to a race win in his first full season, then beat Mark Webber and Fernando Alonso to a title, then won 3 more. Charles showed up at Ferrari, was leading his second ever race for the team before his engine stole his win, and still beat Seb in both their seasons as teammates. Great drivers do not need embossed invitations or perfect circumstances to perform like elite talents. Has Lando done anything as impressive as any of those examples?
Of course he hasn’t. He claims he could have won Monza in 2021 but didn’t out of some deference to Danny Ric, he failed to win Russia despite leading the race because he told his engineer to shut up during a rain storm, he couldn’t steal a win in 2023 anywhere despite the second fastest car for much of the season, he couldn’t even take a pole position in 2023 while Charles took 5 of them in a car that had been developed the wrong way for 6 months. He has three wins this year, sure, but Vegas, Monza, Brazil, and Silverstone are all more impressive wins than any of Lando’s three. And again, he’s lost points in the championship since the Miami update.
Lando season’s has been a failure. It’s mean to say that, but it’s significantly meaner to refuse to hold him to an actual standard because you think he’s not actually good enough to be held to one.
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