LAS VEGAS — Zak Brown says Lando Norris and McLaren have grown together through some of the mistakes and missed opportunities of their otherwise standout 2024 campaign.
After 12 seasons with just a single race victory, McLaren has won five times this year and leads Ferrari in the constructors’ championship by 36 points with a triple header of races to go.
Norris has claimed three of those victories, although his drivers’ championship challenge was dealt a major blow by Verstappen’s win in Brazil two weeks ago.
Ahead of the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Norris said he was not ready to beat Verstappen to the title this year — Brown believes Norris will be ready in 2025.
Speaking to ESPN about the season, Brown said: “You learn along the way, right? A Formula 1 team is about actually kind of constantly making little mistakes, and that’s when you learn… what’s the setup change, or you miss an apex, or you should have pitted a lap later, whatever it is, I think that makes you smarter for the next time around.
“Lando has gone from never winning a race to competing for the championship in the same year, which is pretty rare. [Mika] Hakkinen and did it, you know, one [win] in ’97 and then won the championship in ’98… I think he’s had a lot to digest. I think, you know, everything that we see is every season is he’s getting better.
“Max has the advantage of a handful of world championships, and what, 50 plus wins, wherever he’s at, and he’s not done. So I think Lando going to be someone you got to watch for next year. And don’t underestimate [Oscar] Piastri either.”
On Norris, he added: “If you’re stepping on Red Bull, you know you’re doing a good job. So he’s shown he’s very capable. We’re very capable of taking it to him. When Lando has won a few of his races, he’s just absolutely walked away, right? Singapore it was amazing. Holland was amazing. So let’s see [next year]”.
McLaren’s last championship win was in 2008, eight years before Brown took over as CEO.
The American believes he and Norris are similar in that they are experiencing the realities and challenges of life at the very front end of the F1 grid at the same time and growing as they go.
“I’m one of the less experienced McLaren team members, if you like,” he said. “Out of all our all the great men and women that we have here, there’s a lot of world championships, a lot of race wins, so it probably feels a little bit more foreign to me than some of them. But, you know, we’re head down. We’ve got great leadership from Andrea Stella. A lot of people said, ‘what are you going to do now that you’re leading?’ It’s like, ‘no, I don’t want anything different’. I want to do what got us to where we are. So we’ll just head down, very focused.
“We see how quickly the sport can change. Red Bull went from ‘they’re going to win every race’, to up until Brazil, hadn’t won in half a dozen races, which seems like forever in Red Bull terms. Aston started really strong last year, faded pretty quickly. So I think we’re feet on the ground, head down, recognising how competitive the sport is and how quickly things can change.
“It’s a nervous excitement, at least for myself. But when you’ve got people like Andrea Stella, very calm, very focused, and a lot of experience in the team, I kind of I look to them to see how I should react.”
Source: www.espn.com