Opinion
HINCHCLIFFE: Why I’m so impressed by Norris’ unconventional and unflinchingly honest approach to his racing
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Lando Norris has accomplished an awful lot on the racetrack in the last 12 months. Poles. Wins. Even a late-season championship challenge. However it’s off-track that Norris has really stood out to me, and not in the ways that you might think. Not in ways that people would normally attribute to a championship-contending calibre athlete.
Top-level motorsport is a world that exists in its own microcosm of extreme pressure. As a driver, every lap you turn, every gesture you make, every word you utter – whether it’s over the radio or in an interview – is witnessed and analysed by the entire world. You can rarely be ‘off’. It can be incredibly draining.
As a driver, throughout your ascension to the top of the sport you experience this in increasing amounts at every subsequent rung on the ladder. At each juncture you learn how to best deal with the added pressure.
And all along the way there is an endemic belief in the sport that champions have to be tough and stoic. That they have to be able to compartmentalise emotion. They have to be robots. Killers. Nice guys – as the saying goes – finish last.
Norris has taken a different approach.
“I feel like there is a very prescribed version of how people say a world champion needs to be – overly aggressive,” he told the Guardian newspaper in Japan.
“I want to win a championship. I’d rather just be a good person and try to do well. I’ll do whatever I can to win a championship but maybe I won’t sacrifice in my life as much as some others, in terms of who I am as a person and have the ‘f*** you’ mentality people say you’ve got to have. I still believe I can be a World Champion but doing it by being a nice guy.”
Norris is always brutally honest when dealing with the press
While most drivers are their own harshest critics, that is usually done in private – often not even around their own team. I can think of many times in my own career where I put on a brave face and said the ‘right thing’ through gritted teeth in interviews, only to get back to my room and berate myself for a mistake.
There is no way, however, I would have shared my real feelings with the world. The thought of allowing what was really going through my mind to escape my mouth in front of the media is terrifying.
Not to Norris.
He has done something that very few drivers have done in the past. He has made his self-criticism very public more often than not. He is the first to slam a mistake on a Qualifying lap or a missed opportunity in a race. If anything goes wrong on-track, the assembled media now just expect him to drop a self-deprecating soundbite into his post-session interview.
For example, after he qualified a disappointed sixth in Bahrain, he told the press afterwards: “I feel like I’ve just never driven an F1 car before. I’m struggling a lot, I don’t know why. I need to try and find some answers.
‘I feel like I’ve never driven a Formula 1 car before’ – Norris downbeat after taking P6 in qualifying
“The car’s amazing. I have nothing to complain about,” he added. “The car, the team are doing an amazing job, Oscar’s on pole by a good chunk. I’m thankful for the team, they’re doing an amazing job, just I’m letting them down.”
Some think he shares too much. Others think he draws attention to errors that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. I’ve been on both sides of it. I’ve said I got the most out of the car when I knew full well I’d left time on the table. I’ve also admitted to something on track that wasn’t perceptible from the sidelines, and subsequently been advised to keep my mouth shut.
READ MORE: Norris 'being forced to drive in a different way' as he opens up on car struggles
Learning how to thread that line can be very tricky for a driver. But what the last 12 months has proven is that Norris’ approach, one that seems to be unique to him, is working.
It wasn’t long ago that Norris hadn’t been able to convert any one of his plethora of pole positions into a win. In fact, he wasn’t even able to convert it to leading Lap 1. At the time people thought he wasn’t mentally strong enough, that he would never get over his first lap yips.
Norris is now a five-time Grand Prix winner
But fast forward to now and the five-time Grand Prix winner doesn’t appear to have the start line issues he once did. We’ve seen him survive incredible pressure over entire race distances.
When he’s on, he is very hard to beat. While he hasn’t been able to reach that level of ‘on’ as consistently as he’d like, it is progress. And all that progress came while continuing to be unflinchingly honest with himself and the wider world.
So what is happening? Why is he able to break the mould of what we’ve come to expect of a championship contender? It’s because Norris has the self-awareness to understand that this completely honest approach is what works for him – and he has the bravery to follow through with it.
Even if you could identify that this technique helped you cope with inevitable errors, having the guts to stick with it when it goes against the perceived playbook for how to be a great driver is a massive challenge. I’m not sure many could do it.
An argument could be made that airing out all your mistakes gives the competition an opening to exploit, and for that reason, he should seal his lips and bottle it up. But if that approach meant that he wasn’t able to move past the mistakes as quickly, to learn from them and improve, is it actually doing more harm than good?
Norris has also spoken openly about his mental health struggles – usually another time honoured no-no in the sporting world – and his willingness to break that barrier helps him make himself a better driver, which at the end of the day is his job. Just because his approach is unconventional, it doesn’t make it wrong.
The fact that it has also potentially helped others grapple with their own mental health struggles is a win that, according to Norris, means even more than 25 points.
The McLaren man wants to continue to improve, as we have seen him do in the last year and prove the old adage wrong: in his eyes, nice guys don’t have to finish last. They can be World Champions.
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