Lando Norris: “I want to succeed and achieve my goals with McLaren.”
Since McLaren's comeback on the scene at Silverstone, Lando Norris has secured two podium finishes for his team. While the situation is more than positive for the men in orange, the 23-year-old Briton asserts that he wants to win with McLaren.
A boost in confidence is what Lando Norris needed this season. After a challenging 2022, 2023 had a very rough start for Zak Brown’s team. However, in Austria and in Great Britain, the Woking-based team made an incredible comeback. Previously behind Alpine, McLaren overtook the French team in just three Grand Prix races, extending their lead to 46 points by the summer break. This level of performance pleases Norris and allows him to reaffirm his future ambitions with McLaren, his lifelong team.
Succeeding at McLaren
« I want to succeed and achieve my goals with McLaren. It has been my target ever since I got here, since I entered Formula 1 with this team », said Lando Norris before continuing: « I guess I am a loyal guy, I joined the team, they gave me a chance in Formula 1 and I want to deliver and succeed for them. »
Arriving in Formula 1 in 2019 with McLaren, alongside Carlos Sainz, Lando Norris has never stopped improving, to the point where he has become an experienced driver today, despite still being very young. After some challenging initial seasons, the British driver quickly made a name for himself, first by competing with Sainz and then convincingly beating Daniel Ricciardo in 2021 and 2022. In the role of the experienced teammate facing a rookie, Norris establishes himself as the master of McLaren, the one who will lead the Woking team to victory. In any case, in the recent Grand Prix races, he has shown that he is up for the challenge.
« I think it would be a great story to look back on in 10 or 20 years »
Lando Norris wants to succeed in his lifelong team, the one that allowed him to take his first steps in the premier category of motorsport. He wants to build his career at McLaren. And I think it’s a cool story at the same time, to go from where we were a few years ago, a team that was really struggling, to fighting and being the first team to truly come back from a long way and fight for championships and victories. I think it would be a beautiful story to look back on in 10 or 20 years.
Finally, tied with McLaren until the end of the 2025 season, Norris is reassured by the resurgence in performance and believes that the decision to stay with the British team was the right one. But the more we accomplish things like we have in recent weeks, the more confident I am in the decision I made to stay until 2025, and the more convinced I am that we can achieve our goals together in the future, he concluded. Now, McLaren will have to take another step forward to compete with the best and become a top team again. This step is often the hardest one to climb.
