Lando Norris teases ‘bigger changes’ at McLaren ahead of F1 2024 assault

Lando Norris has predicted “bigger changes” to come for McLaren after an impressive mid-season turnaround in 2023.

McLaren started the season as one of the worst on the grid but come Silverstone, they were arguably the second quickest teams behind Red Bull.

But they are an ambitious outfit and want to return to their title-winning days of yesteryear.

Lando Norris confident McLaren on the right track

McLaren took the drastic decision to sack technical director James Key early in 2023 and split his role into three parts with many of those new arrivals starting in 2024.

As such, lead driver Norris has predicted “bigger changes” to come at the team he has spent his whole career at.

“I expect some bigger changes than we’ve had over the last year,” he told media including PlanetF1.com. “I feel like we’ve been in a place, now more than ever, where we can tackle more things at once.

“If you’re still last, you kind of try to focus a little more on one thing, just making the car a little bit quicker.

“Now I think we’re in a much better position. Now we can focus on some of the finer details, but details we’ve not really been able to improve much at all over the last five years. Things that I would love to have more of as a driver and I think suited me more as a driver.

“I think now we’re more capable than everyone trying to focus on them and improve them. That will help with qualifying, that will help with race pace, help with racing.

“Some small things can make a big difference so if we can work on that, then I’m confident we can have a very good car next year and a more consistent car. That’s really the main thing that we want to have.”

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At the start of 2023, there were strong rumours about Norris and a move away from the underperforming side but now he now believes they are both on the same trajectory.

“I believe so,” he said. “I think I’ve definitely been at my best in terms of performance, maybe not at the beginning of the year, but I worked with them quite a bit on trying to still adapt to this car, because it’s not an easy car and there’s sort of things every weekend that I struggle with.

“But I spent the first part of the season maybe not in the right space. How I want to drive quickly is the opposite of how this car wants me to and so my natural thing of going out and driving qualifying as best as I could is not how the car needs to be driven. So I still have to change a little bit how I have to drive the car.

“Since I’m saying the halfway point of the season, I felt more confident. I believe that McLaren can turn things around and I think this was the year that we needed and the team needed to kind of prove those things.”

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