Lando Norris said any hopes for him to chase down Max Verstappen and win this year’s Formula 1 drivers’ championship were “a little far-fetched” as he accepted official honors for finishing as runner-up.
Verstappen had a comfortable lead after winning seven of the first 10 races this season, before Norris threatened a challenge as the Red Bull driver went 10 races without a victory. Norris had cut the deficit to 47 points — still nearly two race victories — heading into the race weekend at Interlagos, but a Verstappen win in the wet all but ended the battle and Norris believes it wasn’t realistic to expect him to overturn such a big margin.
“I was never close enough to Max,” Norris said at the FIA Prize Giving in Rwanda. “I think if anyone thought I was going to get it, that was probably a little far-fetched. But at the same time, we tried for as long as possible — I tried.”
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Norris won the final round in Abu Dhabi to secure the constructors’ championship for McLaren, and CEO Zak Brown says both he and teammate Oscar Piastri were central to that achievement.
“Andrea [Stella, team principal] has done an unbelievable job leading this racing team, we have two awesome racing drivers, as we’ve said from the word go, and all the men and women at McLaren have done a wonderful job,” Brown said.
“I think to go down to the wire, against Ferrari — if you had one team to pick to go down to the last lap with, Ferrari would be it — and they did an unbelievable job. They kept us honest the whole way through.”
From Stella’s perspective, a first constructors’ championship success as a team principal is a new experience after being part of the Ferrari dominance of the mid-2000s.
“It’s different from many points of view,” Stella said. “It’s different because this championship means taking McLaren to success after 26 years. So, a long time without celebrations.
“It’s different for me personally — a completely different role — and it’s different because it’s unprecedented how rapidly we evolved from being last last year after the first couple of races. We had zero points, last in the classification, and now 666 and world champions.”