That’s more or less how Lando Norris summed up his own 2023 season. But at the same time he continues to amaze a McLaren team boss who has worked with champions including Michael Schumacher. The question, then, isn’t whether he can he do better, but how – especially when Max Verstappen continues to set new standards…
2023 APPRAISAL BY ANDREW BENSON
LANDO NORRIS
Lando Norris ended 2023 having consolidated his status as one of the top four or five Formula 1 drivers, but also admitting: “I can do better.”
In the context of a season of almost unprecedented perfection from Max Verstappen, the same could be said of any of Norris’s immediate rivals. Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso, Charles Leclerc, Carlos Sainz and George Russell – to list them in championship-finishing order – all made mistakes at one point or another last season. But in the case of Norris, you could see his point.
On the one hand, his season was highly impressive. From the introduction of McLaren’s first major upgrade in Austria, Norris was the second-highest scoring driver of the season with 193 points, 34 more even than the second Red Bull driver Sergio Pérez. Norris outscored Leclerc by 41 points despite his and Ferrari’s strong end to the season, and Hamilton by 61.
But at the same time, there was a strong sense of what might have been.
Verstappen was out of reach, and any criticism that Norris could have fought the Dutchman harder when the Red Bull was coming back through the field in Austin or Brazil was founded on a misunderstanding of the superiority of the most dominant car in history on race days.
In those situations, Norris – like anyone else in 2023 – was literally helpless. Fighting Verstappen only risked chewing up his tyres and losing him race time to his real rivals.
Leaving Verstappen out of it, though, there were some high-profile mistakes from Norris. Most, but not all, in qualifying.
In Qatar, he qualified 10th for the grand prix after track-limits transgressions on both his runs left him without a time in the final session. And he missed out on pole in the sprint race after another error let team-mate Oscar Piastri in for the place at the front of the grid.
From there, it was Piastri who took McLaren’s only race win of 2023 as Norris fought back to third after a bad start.
In Mexico, further errors in the first qualifying session left him 17th on the grid. And in Abu Dhabi he made a mistake at Turn 13 on his single run in Q3, leaving him
