When Lando Norris signed his last contract extension at McLaren, shortly before the 2022 season began, it was a significant pointer to his rising status at the team.
While his senior team mate Daniel Ricciardo had just ended McLaren’s nine-year wait for a grand prix victory the season before, Norris had clearly been the more accomplished performer over the year. His reward was a contract extension which took him beyond Ricciardo’s, to 2025.
When the under-performing Ricciardo was shown the door a year early, and rookie Oscar Piastri hired to replace him, Norris became the team’s senior driver. But as last season began it would have been understandable if he’d had second thoughts about his decision to commit to them for the long-term.
McLaren’s progress appeared to have stalled. Granted, their third place in the 2020 championship was flattered by a truly awful year for Ferrari, but by 2022 they’d slipped to fifth.
When last season began, for a second year in a row, McLaren started off on the back foot. At the MCL60’s launch the team admitted elements of its design needed to be corrected.
Although Norris escaped Q1 in the Bahrain opener, unlike his new team mate, it was by the slimmest of margins: He tied Logan Sargeant’s time and only got through at the Williams driver’s expense because he set it first. While Piastri retired early on, Norris suffered an interminable race of six pit stops due to a pneumatic system fault.
Meanwhile Andreas Seidl, who had overseen McLaren’s progress over the previous seasons, had been lured away to join what will become Audi’s F1 team when the next generation of power units arrive in 2026. Andrea Stella had been promoted to the position of team principal for the first time in his career.
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McLaren picked Norris up when he was racing in the junior formulae and brought him into F1. But in March last year, early in his fifth season at the team, he must have wondered whether better options were open to him elsewhere.
Was McLaren’s recent progress now in reverse? Should he look to leave an engine customer team for one with a manufacturer relationship, which some expect will offer a significant advantage when the 2026 engine regulations arrive, as was the case for Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes 10 years ago?
In any event, McLaren pulled off one of the most…
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