Norris on Rossi, self-belief and why simracing lacks the ‘fear’ of real motorsport

Lando Norris is in some respects exactly what you’d expect from Formula 1’s youngest current driver.

Still a teenager (he turns 20 in November) Norris is utterly at home when it comes to Twitch streams and social media memes. They wire him in directly to the growing fanbase around one of this year’s exciting new talents.

But Norris is less at home when it comes to handling the F1 media. When he was announced as a McLaren driver a little over a year ago, there was an obvious nervousness in his first dealing with an F1 press pack eager to learn all about the team’s new signing.

Fast-forward 12 months and Norris is much more at ease fielding questions as he speaks to RaceFans and two other media outlets at Monza ahead of the Italian Grand Prix. He’s decked out in Valentino Rossi-themed kit this weekend, having met his hero at Silverstone a few weeks earlier.

Had things worked out differently, Norris might have ended up in Moto GP himself. “I was on two wheels before I was on four,” he explains.

“I was on a motorbike, motocross, 50cc or 60cc motocross. And I loved doing it. But as soon as I then tried karting I just had more love for that.

“When I spoke to Rossi, he was the opposite. He started in karting when he was seven. He loved doing it but then as soon as he tried motorbikes he just had more passion, more love for doing that.”

Norris’s ascent through the junior categories was accompanied by an avalanche of silverware. In 2016 alone he won a trio of championships in the New Zealand Toyota Racing Series, Formula Renault NEC and Formula Renault Eurocup.

Nonetheless he is surprisingly self-effacing about his obvious talent. He recently admitted he once doubted he’d ever get into Formula 1. Even after an impressive first outing as a McLaren test driver, Norris says it wasn’t until he drove an F1 car during a race weekend that he believed he could do it.

McLaren had never previously run a rookie driver in place of a race driver during practice, but they made an exception for Norris at Monza and Spa last year before confirming his race seat for 2019.

“Doing the [first practice] against Fernando [Alonso], doing pretty well in the intermediate conditions which was one of the first times I’ve driven in the wet, doing well then and being fast, that was quite a big confidence booster,” he explains.

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“The times before that: I did well in F2, I won in Bahrain, it still didn’t make me think ‘now I’ve won enough in F2 I know I can go into F1 and I can out-qualify him and I can beat him in the race’. I don’t know why, it didn’t give me the confidence to be able to say that, or the knowledge.

“But doing FP1, being in the situation of going up against Fernando, that’s the only time I thought ‘actually I’ve done pretty well here I think’. That was the first time.

“Even the pre-season and in-season tests, I did Budapest, I was quick, even on the first ever day I did testing in F1 I was super-quick. But it still didn’t give me the confidence to say if I was chucked into a race now I’d nail it qualifying, nail it in the race.”

McLaren have already confirmed both Norris and Carlos Sainz Jnr will drive for them again next year. More often than not, Norris has shown he can “nail it” when the opportunity is there.

The point isn’t to “be green, green, green in every sector or purple or nail every corner on my best lap”, he says, but to ensure those opportunities are taken. “If we get a chance to be in Q3 I’m in Q3. If we get a chance to beat a certain team, say the main competitor for us in the constructors’ on race day, I make sure I do that. I don’t miss out on any opportunities to achieve for the team.

“There’s been a couple of times this year where, Hockenheim say, Carlos got into Q3 [but] I didn’t even get out of Q1, by the smallest margins which makes it even worse.

“The Sunday turned in to be a pretty crazy Sunday so it kind of changes things. But I feel like I let down the team because I should’ve done a better job. And that’s the only thing that really annoys me, is when I know I should’ve done better but I didn’t.

“I missed out on an opportunity to score better for the team. I want to make sure that doesn’t happen. So every opportunity I have to get into Q2 or get into Q3 or out-qualify the main competitor or to beat him on Sunday, it’s to always do that.”

Sainz has bagged the majority of the team’s points so far but Norris has demonstrated he is capable of beating his team mate. As Norris’s experience rises, and if McLaren continues its climb back to the front of the field, the friendly relations between the pair may become more strained.

“I think we’re both pretty open with trying to help each other, which at the moment only benefits each other,” says Norris. Post-Monza, he’s 9-5 up against Sainz in qualifying.

“I don’t know what the differences are on average this year in terms of qualifying. Between team-mates I think it’s always so close. We always try and help each other and we want to do better as a team.

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“It might change once you get to a different position in terms of racing for wins or something, I think that’s just inevitable, that’s just life. At the moment there’s obviously more for me to learn from him because of his experience but there’s still some things which on a certain day I might be better and he would ask me how I do it so we learn from each other.”

Norris’s ‘other team mate’ is Red Bull rival Max Verstappen, with whom he has won endurance GT races for Team Redline. The pair’s marathon racing sessions are live-streamed by Norris, who jokes that if he wasn’t an F1 driver he’d be a “Twitch streamer”.

While Norris’s real-world track skills have won him many supporters, his online persona and social media savvy have boosted his recognition among the younger generation of motor sport fans F1 is desperate to court. Though Norris is not alone among drivers in having assistance with presenting himself online, he says his posts do reflect his own thoughts and humour.

“You plan some things, but a lot of it is just what you just feel like saying at a time” he says. “All the captions are just things I think of in a time of wanting to do it.

“Certain posts I obviously have an idea about maybe months ago or something, but I can’t do it until a perfect time to then put it out. So it’s still me, it’s just who I just choose to be at the time. It’s not a fake thing, trying to just be funny.”

While Twitch gives Norris the opportunity to address his fans unfiltered, it can present problems as well. After the summer break he revealed in one stream he had injured his foot, which came as a surprise to his team.

As a leading light in the new generation of drivers who have grown up with race simulators, Norris’s insight into the opportunities and limitations of the technology are fascinating. In particularly, the fact simracing cannot replicate the ‘fear factor’ of real motorsport.

“I think it can make you very good in quite a few areas such as race craft, accuracy, knowledge for set-ups and how to make a car better,” he explains. “It can bring a lot of positives.

“But the only thing is people don’t do well with G-force and fear. There’s a lot of things you can learn and do very well in the simulator and Esports and racing which they can correlate very well when they actually get a chance to go in a car.

“What can be very easy on a sim is the only feelings you have is your steering wheel and the pedals, and there’s hardly any interchangeable conditions. So it’s much easier to be accurate and do the same thing every single lap.

“With real life you have the tiniest bit of a headwind or a tailwind the car’s going to snap unpredictably, you’re going to lock up unpredictably, it’s then getting more adaptable to those kind of conditions. Maybe in the future simracing will be better on that type of thing but that’s still to come.

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“So there’s a lot of skills you can learn but then the fear, the G force and the determination to just get on track and be able to do it like that that’s the thing which I think they will struggle with.”

While the rig Norris has at home would be the envy of many simracers, he stresses it’s strictly for fun compared to the one he drives at the McLaren Technology Centre, 15 kilometres up the road from his Guildford home.

“Everything I do at McLaren I do for work and to make me better, make the car better,” he says. “In the off-season I spend a lot of time on my simulator and quite a bit of time on the simulator at McLaren.”

During the season he finds he does less recreational racing at home. “It becomes much more driving on the simulator at McLaren and less of driving at home when I want. Mainly because [the schedule] gets so compact it’s nice to not do anything sometimes.

“Last year I was doing a lot more on my sim at home than I am this year because when I get home I just want to do nothing but switch on the TV and watch some TV, not go and drive again.”

Norris was only seven years old when his McLaren predecessor Lewis Hamilton made his astonishing debut. The team were championship contenders at the time and Hamilton was subjected to a blaze of publicity as he fought team mate Fernando Alonso for the championship.

So far, Norris hasn’t had to deal with the same kind of recognition Hamilton had. “The guy who runs the local shop he knows who I am,” he says. “Just walking down the street not many people would [recognise him].

“If you see Lewis walking down the street I don’t know if everyone would go ‘that’s definitely Lewis’, I think you’d be a bit ‘no, he wouldn’t be walking in Guildford’. I came on the plane here on EasyJet and people were like ‘you’re actually flying on an EasyJet?’.”

But as the public interest in him continues to grow, Norris is gradually getting used to it. “It’s more when you come to the track, that’s all,” he says. “It’s a cool feeling.

“It’s huge: The following I had last year was already good but it’s more than doubled since last year. Sometimes it’s annoying when you want to go home. But at the end of the day, you think about it, it’s nice having that feeling that people respect you, they look up to you.

“You know you get messages where they say – not just me – but drivers make their day or you made their day and you made them smile. Those are the kind of things which make it much more worthwhile.”

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