Norris’ grit, poise deliver McLaren F1’s constructors’ crown

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — After clinching McLaren’s first Formula 1 constructors’ championship since 1998, Lando Norris signed off the season with a clear statement of intent: “Next year’s going to be my year, too.” It was a fitting message to follow his performance: a flawless drive to victory in a grand prix where everything could have fallen apart for McLaren in a way that might have overshadowed what has been a breakthrough season for the British team and its superstar driver.

“We want to win the constructors’, we want to win the drivers’ next year,” Norris said.

While it has been easy to poke holes in parts of Norris’ season, he goes into the winter break on the back of one of the most important performances in his team’s recent history.

McLaren’s comfortable position going into the race, with Norris starting ahead of teammate Oscar Piastri in a front-row lockout, was shattered just seconds in to the contest. Max Verstappen’s optimistic lunge down the inside spun the Australian around and suddenly left Norris to fend off Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz — the Ferrari pairing that trailed McLaren by 21 points in the constructors’ standings before the lights went out on Sunday — all by himself.

“I was watching the TV screens and I saw Charles was P8 after Lap 1 … so I was a little bit nervous, but I knew I just had to focus on myself, put my head down,” Norris said after the race. “For a minute, my heart was like, ‘Oh God, it’s not looking as likely,’ but if I just kept my head down and kept focused, I knew I could deliver and do what I got to do.”

With everything to lose, Norris was sublime. Lonely wins out in front can look routine, but they are anything but.

“Carlos was never far away,” Norris said on Sunday evening. “I think the biggest I got the gap was to like 4.2 seconds in the first stint, and that’s not a very nice gap, in my opinion. It’s a bit too close to my comfort.”

In the end, his gap to Sainz in second was 5.832 seconds, demonstrating great poise to manage his advantage. Such composure hasn’t always been a given.

While his 2024 has been a breakthrough in the sense that he earned his maiden win and added three more victories, there were moments along the way when he attracted criticism. Before the midway point of the season, Norris was an outsider in the title fight, but it would be easy to argue that his battle with Verstappen — whose campaign appeared to be in full implosion halfway through the year — should have been much closer.

He never quite bested Verstappen in their wheel-to-wheel battles, and there were multiple races that appeared to slip through his fingers. He also struggled to take advantage of the eight pole positions he secured in 2024, Sunday’s race in Abu Dhabi just the third time he claimed victory after starting first on the grid.

A year for learning ahead of a season McLaren has set itself the goal of challenging for the drivers’ title from the outset can’t be a bad thing.

“I think the one thing I’ve learned this year is probably to believe in myself a bit more,” Norris said. “So I’ve certainly not come out on top as often as I would have liked in certain moments as a driver, especially in my fights against Max. As much as it hurts sometimes, I’m probably happy about it now that I’m going to go into next season knowing that I can fight.”

Much of the focus on Norris’ campaign has come from the added scrutiny that a championship contender receives. While it has seemed at times that the British driver has been irritated by the headlines generated in the lower moments of his season, he was in a philosophical mood on Sunday evening.

“It’s probably the harder moments which are the ones you learn the most,” he said. “So it’s kind of true what people say, but those harder times … None of them are necessarily ones which have made me doubt myself any more.

“This season’s been my best season from a performance [perspective], like personally. Was it good enough? Probably it wasn’t, no. But when you look at my own performance and my qualifying performances, for instance, they’ve been almost twice as good as what I was last year, especially comparing to the other guys in exactly the same car. So I’ve definitely stepped it up at a good level this season.”

It won’t just be Norris who takes valuable lessons from 2024 into next season. McLaren found itself struggling to adapt to its new reality as a bona fide contender week to week, bungling team orders calls in Hungary and Italy, the latter allowing Ferrari to take a victory that galvanised the famous red team and helped start a run of results that took the constructors’ fight to the final race of the season.

Like Norris, McLaren delivered in the pressure cooker environment under the lights.

The best example of that was on Lap 27, when Norris came in to make his one stop of the contest. Sainz had stopped one lap earlier, and one small mistake could drop Norris behind the Spaniard and into a position that would have swung the live standings back in Ferrari’s favour.

McLaren’s pit crew did not blink.

“The whole season was in the last pitstop,” team boss Andrea Stella said on Sunday evening. “A problem at the pitstop and we could have lost the position to Carlos and we could have lost the championship. The guys delivered what I think is one of the best pitstops of the season, confirming the trajectory which was not only car performance but was the overall maturity, mentality, emotional resilience of the entire team.”

McLaren started this season on the back foot, with five races passing before the upgrade package in Miami that vaulted the team back into the conversation. Company CEO Zak Brown spoke to a handful of journalists ahead of the weekend and said McLaren’s big goal going into 2025 is to hit the ground running.

If the English outfit get the car and the version of Norris they had in Abu Dhabi, it could be another history-making year for the team in papaya.