Brown Confident Norris Will Stay With McLaren

Friday, 19 January 2024 at 01:00

In one of his recent interviews, Zak Brown expressed his confidence in keeping Lando Norris at McLaren beyond the season 2025.

Lando Norris's contract with McLaren lasts until the end of the 2025 season. However, the 24-year-old driver shows so much potential that McLaren needs to secure him sooner rather than later to prevent other teams from poaching.

The CEO of McLaren's F1 team, Zak Brown, stated his team has the best driver pairing on the grid, and there is no number he would be interested in trading Norris for.

However, it is more or less expected other teams will reach the number four driver with very lucrative offers, and the CEO has to somehow make sure the talented driver will stay with McLaren. He told motorsport.com:

"I tend to focus on making sure that McLaren is the best place environment and people want to be with us. Because you ultimately can’t control external approaches to those various people."

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By creating the environment that Brown described, he remains confident Norris will resist potential offers from other teams like Red Bull or Ferrari.

"So, no, I’m very confident the relationship that we have with Lando [remains strong]. I know he’s very excited for this year and was very impressed with what he saw in the second half of last year."

After the end of the last season, the 24-year-old driver stated he could not wish for a better team principal than Andrea Stella. He could be just one of many other reasons he should want to stay with the team Brown suggests.

"He loves working with Andrea and everyone on the team. So, all we need to keep doing is giving him the environment he wants to be in."

The question is whether Norris will want a better environment with a worse potential car or a worse environment with a potentially faster car. When it comes to McLaren's CEO, he has no doubt Norris will stick with his current team.