Does Norris have a chance of winning the 2024 F1 title?

Lando Norris‘ final margin over Max Verstappen stood at a cavernous 22.896 seconds at the point the chequered flag lithely fluttered at the Dutch Grand Prix’s close. 

Of the season so far, this was now the biggest winning gap – almost half a second larger than Verstappen’s buffer over Sergio Perez at the Bahrain opener. It’s also the most commanding win since Verstappen’s Hungary 2023 triumph, a 33-second chasm that separated him and Norris over a year ago.

To further elaborate upon his point, Norris managed to capture the fastest lap of the race to knock eight points out of his championship arrears to Verstappen. There’s “just” 70 points between them, which lays somewhere between a gulf and a canyon to overcome across the final nine races in the title fight.

Nobody has turned around a championship lead gap that large in such a comparatively short space of time. It’s not that it can’t be done mathematically, of course, but it’d be a vastly unlikely comeback that would arguably provide an even bigger shock than the announcement of Lewis Hamilton’s move to Ferrari.

But does Norris have a hope in hell of achieving such implausible odds? With apologies to Ian Betteridge and his law of headlines, the answer is ‘yes’ – only accompanied with a ‘but’.  

The permutations are thus: Norris’ engineer Will Joseph, in his pleas for his driver to let Piastri through at the Hungarian Grand Prix, stated that Norris would “need the team” to assist in his plans for a title – that he could not hope to win it on his lonesome. And that assertion would be correct; Norris indeed needs Piastri to assist him with any hopes of a 2024 title victory. McLaren needs Piastri to start acting as a Verstappen-focused disruptor across the majority of the upcoming races, as his presence in the top three is a prerequisite to Norris closing that 70-point lead.

Norris could win all nine races left on the calendar – and the three remaining sprints – and not have enough in the bank if Verstappen finishes second in all of them. Assuming neither driver achieves a fastest lap, Norris would end up with 474 points as his final tally, four short of Verstappen. With five fastest laps, Norris can make up the arrears, but this supposition stands upon shaky ground. Would Red Bull blink if it needed to box Perez and sacrifice…