Lando Norris didn’t mince his words when asked whether he has any sympathy for current teammate Daniel Ricciardo’s struggles, adding that “people will probably hate me” for his answer.
“I hate to say it, but I would say no,” the rising star said Thursday. “People will probably hate me for saying it, but it’s difficult because I never know if I might encounter that in the future with this car or with a different team or whatever, so I never want to contradict myself going into the future, but I’ve just got to focus on my driving.”
McLaren Racing and Ricciardo “mutually agreed” for him to leave at the end of the season, a year before his contract was set to expire. The eight-time grand prix winner has struggled this season, recording just 19 of the Woking-based team’s 95 points. Norris said he is “surprised because when Daniel came into the team, everyone expected more. I’m sure himself even, he expected more from himself.”
At the end of the day, every Formula One driver does need to look out for themself given the cutthroat nature of the business. There are only 20 seats on the grid among 10 teams, and not everyone’s contract is up at the same time, limiting the opportunities. Or, as in Ricciardo’s case, they can be cut prematurely.
“It’s not my job to focus on someone else, and I’m not a driver coach, I’m not here to help and do those kind of things. I’m here to perform at my absolute best and that’s about it. So it’s difficult when people start to have an expectation that it’s my job to also do these other things and helping and describing this and doing that when that’s not really the case,” Norris said. “It’s also the case that if I don’t perform well for a few years then it can also be the end of my career, the end of me driving in Formula One, so I’ve got to focus on myself for the majority of it. Every driver has to adapt to the scenarios that they’re in and that’s what I feel like I’ve had to do.
“It’s not a car that I’ve just been able to jump in and feel like I can just flow with and perform exactly like I want. At the beginning of the year Daniel was performing better than I was—in the preseason tests and stuff—and it looked like he could just go out naturally and drive the car how he wanted to, and I had to start to learn a new way of driving compared to how I’d been used to driving the car for the last few years.
“So I feel like I’ve had to do a job of adapting and so has he, but I don’t feel like for any driver you would have to have sympathy for them because they have not been able to do as good of a job.”
Norris did debunk that the car was built around him, stating, “The only thing that people get extremely wrong is, any opinion, thinking the car’s designed around me or suiting me more than it is him.
“If I could choose an exact driving style for me to have and for a car to suit, this car doesn’t give me anything of what I want to do. And therefore the job as a driver is to adapt to that and just do the best you can with the car, which is what I’m doing and maybe easier for me to do than it is for Daniel.”
Ricciardo revealed Thursday that he and the team had been discussing for months how to improve his performance before it shifted to his exit. He said, “It wasn’t just a random call one day, and ‘Hey, this is what we’re doing.’
“We’ve been in dialogue for really the last few months. And it wasn’t like, ‘Don’t top five this race, and you’re done.’ But it was more, ‘What can we do? How can we as a collective try to keep making this work?’”
- Sebastian Vettel Addresses F1 CEO’s Woman Driver Remarks
- F1’s Daniel Ricciardo Would Consider Sabbatical ‘If It Made Sense’
- Ricciardo’s Next Move Leads F1 Story Lines for Season’s Final Stretch
- Auto Racing Digest: The Top 10 Formula One Seasons of the 2010s
For more racing coverage, head to Auto Racing Digest.
