Lando Norris admits that he had to dramatically adapt his driving style in 2022, with the Briton suggesting that McLaren's car was initially more suited to Daniel Ricciardo. Despite outperforming Ricciardo during the Australian's two-year stint at the team, Norris says that the squad's 2022 challenger was not necessarily suited to his own driving style. This left him with the task of "relearning" his approach to driving the car. "It's just not a simple car to drive," Norris told The Race . "There's techniques and characteristics you have to try and understand. In the beginning, my driving style from last year was the opposite of what I needed. "So even though it's a McLaren and we struggled with similar things in some ways, the way you have to drive it is very different. Therefore, I've actually had to relearn a lot."
How Norris 'forced' himself to drive differently
Reflecting back on the 2022 season, Norris feels that he did a good job of changing his driving style to better suit the MCL36 car. "Daniel's natural driving style at the beginning of the year suited the car more than it did me and I had to force myself to drive in a different way," Norris explained. "I feel I've done a good job [of that], similar to Carlos [Sainz, at Ferrari]. He complained a lot at the beginning of the season and had to do a lot of work to adapt to make the most of the car. "That's the driver's job, at the end of the day, no matter what the car is. Whether the car is easy to drive or hard to drive, the driver's job is to go out and adapt to it and understand how to drive it in the quickest way. "But it does take time. That's something that's made me believe I've done a good job this year."
Norris explains challenge of 2022 car
In terms of how he approached driving the 2022 car, Norris admits that this could differ not just between tracks but between individual sections of a circuit. "A lot of things for us stem off the braking and entry phase, braking and steering, how you combine these two things," he said. "For one corner, you'll have to do it this way and literally the next corner, it goes the opposite way and you have to do something different, just because it's a little bit tighter or it's a little bit more open, or the wind's a little bit different. "Every single corner, you need to learn how to drive the car. It's not like you come to a new track and this track you have to drive the car like this. You come to this track, you have to learn every single corner how to drive the car in a different way. "And what makes it so difficult is that you don't drive a car on a circuit, you drive a car per corner. And that's just not a nice thing to be honest."
Most read
