Norris Still Surprised By His Team: 'One Of The Biggest Turnarounds In Probably Last 10 Years'
F1Sunday, 03 December 2023 at 16:00
Lando Norris remarked on the turnaround McLaren pulled off mid-season, which allowed him to compete for podiums.
The McLaren F1 team ended the 2023 season on such a high everybody almost forgot how low the British team was at the beginning of this season.
The team climbed from the utter back of the grid to fourth place in the Constructors' Championship in 13 races and proved to everyone huge gains in performance are possible.
Lando Norris, who achieved an amazing seven podiums since McLaren introduced their upgrades, told the media after the last race of the season, the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
I'm so emotionally proud of the whole team, that they did such a big turnaround. It was one of the biggest turnarounds in probably the last 10 years, in a period of time when it's more difficult than ever to turn the car around because of wind tunnel time and costs and all of these things.
Budget caps were introduced to F1 a while ago in order to bring the grid together and to make sure the biggest teams don't win just because of their endless resources,
Now that teams can only spend a certain amount of money in a year, it was considered even more challenging for teams to catch up in the development race. However, McLaren showed it's possible. Norris continued:
"The beginning was tough because I thought it was going to be for a whole year. We didn't know how much we were going to improve, especially at the very beginning."
Norris shared how difficult the start of the season was, not knowing whether his team would ever be able to close the gap. The Haas F1 team is an excellent example of how upgrades do not always work.
"We said 'We'll be a bit patient and we know we've got some decent things coming'. But in the past few years, when you've had decent things come in, they've not always stood up to be that much of an improvement."
On the other hand, the 24-year-old says the upgrades surprisingly worked almost too well, almost better than his team expected, which does not happen too often in Formula One.
"This year was quite the opposite and turned out to be almost a bigger improvement than we were expecting."
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