McLaren Formula 1 boss Andrea Stella says the team is aiming to identify methods to prevent Lando Norris from being “very harsh on himself” following any mistakes.
Norris took advantage of McLaren’s mid-season resurgence to enjoy his most productive campaign in F1, recording seven podiums to amass a career-best 205 points.
But while Red Bull’s crushing dominance of the 2023 campaign was mainly responsible for denying him a maiden F1 victory, Norris also rued squandering some opportunities.
The Briton believes he missed out on pole position in Qatar when he exceeded track limits, while he also lambasted his efforts in qualifying in the United States and Mexico.
That culminated with Norris labelling his one-lap form “shit” in Abu Dhabi after a slide in the final sector dropped him from the front row to fifth for the final grand prix of 2023.
While Stella previously admitted he wasn’t concerned by the self-criticism, the McLaren chief has proposed that Norris could benefit from having a stronger support network.
Asked if he thought McLaren needed to contribute to manage the recurring situation, Stella said: “It’s about how you judge situations, it’s about how you talk about situations, about how you interpret yourself. This one certainly deserves some attention.
“How can we just sometimes accept that a 99.9% lap is good enough? What are you up against? Always the 100% or consistency?
“When you look into opportunities with drivers, with the athletes at this level, you do it as a group. You do it 360 degrees around the driver.
“You can see in tennis, these players, they have an entourage around them, which is to support this incredible performance to actually deliver to the best of their potential.”
With Oscar Piastri also experiencing issues, Stella conceded McLaren’s updates could have introduced some unintended negative handling traits to the team’s MCL60 car.
However, Stella contends that Norris continues to be too harsh about his own performance and insists that any blunders should be used constructively to improve.
“Certainly, even the way he addresses his own performance I think deserves attention because he just seems very harsh on himself,” the Italian added.
“Sometimes we need to focus on the positives. There’s quite a lot of positives and we need to make sure that we look into that, and we make the negatives in a way be functional to perform, not simply to punish yourself.”
Having comfortably toppled Daniel Ricciardo, Norris was tasked with going up against Piastri, who excelled in his rookie campaign to score a victory in the Qatar Sprint race.
Piastri proved to be an equal match for his more experienced team-mate in qualifying, prompting suggestions that Norris’ slip-ups derived from now facing pressure internally.
When that particular topic was forwarded to his team boss, Stella commented: “Because you have a competitive team-mate, you can see how you can go quicker in some places.
“We need to make sure that we support our drivers, extract their potential, which is something that is just continuous improvement.
“You do have to use all the information, including looking at trends during qualifying, like what happens when at the point we make a mistake, under which circumstances did we do that?
“Is there something that can be improved technically, but is there something that can be improved from the human side?
“So definitely we know that when the team-mate is strong, the second element [errors] tends to be more prevalent. So, something definitely to think about.”
