McLaren team principal Andrea Stella identified this as one of the steps Norris has made towards completeness from last year to this.
“In the race,” Stella said, “he seems to be become more and more consistent and more and more capable of understanding what is going on, what is going on with the tyres, which axle is going, how long can the tyres go.
“What we call the race-craft seems to be becoming larger and larger and more and more accurate.”
Stella said Norris and the team had worked hard over the winter on identifying weaknesses in his game last year – such as a propensity for making errors in qualifying – and tried to iron them out for 2024.
“What Lando had done this year,” Stella said after the race, “he has been able to capitalise on a lot of points and opportunities that we identified last year. For instance, one is qualifying performance: how do you put together clean laps in qualifying?
“Last year, he was quick but we have had several situations like in Qatar when he could have been on pole position but he had both laps in Q3 deleted. There was a lot to take from there and from other situations.
“So he has done a really good job on working on the opportunities together with his engineers and the support of the factory to make some small adaptations to be able top exploit the potential of the car to a greater extent. This is credit to him.”
The result is a driver becoming a complete performer, and everyone in the paddock now recognises him as being part of the elite group also featuring Verstappen, Hamilton, Alonso and Leclerc.
Norris was asked by Nico Rosberg on Sky television after the race whether he felt he was driving as well as anyone in F1 and whether a long-awaited win might be coming.
“I feel like it, but that’s F1,” he said. “Max is doing a good job, Red Bull are doing an amazing job. I can’t fault them and I can’t be too annoyed at that.
“I feel like I am getting a lot out of the car, especially on Sundays. So I have to be happy with the job I’m doing and one day, I think it’s coming. I am not overconfident in saying it. I think we can get a win this year. It is going to be difficult, we have a lot of work to do but we’re working hard.”
A win against Red Bull is going to require an upgrade to the McLaren car and some luck. A first significant upgrade is coming – at the next race in Miami – but the team do not expect it to make them winners on its own.
Stella said: “I have a lot of admiration for what Red Bull are achieving. Winning so consistently is not easy. There are so many reasons things can go wrong even if they make it look easy. Even if it looks ordinary, it’s not. We do look at how they do things. But my thoughts are, how do we get there?”
Stella pointed out accurately that McLaren have made more progress more than any other team over the last 12 months – but then after a weak start to last year, they had a lot of room for improvement.
He also said that they, like everyone else, were suffering from the major step forward Red Bull had made with this year’s car, after stopping developing last year’s dominant model early to focus on 2024.
“We lost some ground because we gained so much ground before while they were not developing,” Stella said. “That’s why we have to look at things over the long period and over that long period we are on a strong trajectory.
“If we keep this strong trajectory for the next 12 months, why not? We may reach Red Bull.”
