Lando Norris reveals mental rewiring after initial F1 2025 struggles

Lando Norris believes his difficult start to the F1 2025 season forced him to re-evaluate his approach to the rest of the championship.

After the first quarter of the F1 2025 championship, Norris trailed McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri by three victories, with the Australian having won four of the first six races, and Norris equal with Max Verstappen on just a single win.

Lando Norris: The struggles turned into strength

Norris was 16 points behind Piastri after the Miami Grand Prix, marking the quarter mark of the championship, having struggled to keep pace with his teammate initially.

But, through the middle part of the season, Norris began to turn things around as he started to click more with the MCL39, particularly after upgrades introduced to the car by McLaren brought back more feeling to his driving.

However, there was more to the quest than just adjusting to the car, with Norris digging deep on the mental front to start addressing some of his weaknesses, revealing after the season that he had worked with a sports psychologist to help in this area.

Another change Norris made was taking away his delta time display during qualifying, as he felt that slight errors during a lap resulted in him pushing harder to try to compensate. By removing the delta time, Norris couldn’t be distracted by the tantalising hundredths and thousandths of a second being shown to him and, as a result, could drive more naturally without that distraction.

Having clearly started to match Piastri on pace through the middle third of the season, Norris’ championship bid took a serious blow with an engine failure at Zandvoort, but he embarked on a stellar run of form in the last quarter to become the lead McLaren driver and hold off the charge of the resurgent Verstappen.

With his first title, Norris thus joins a small but elite group of drivers to have won a championship, and is the first driver since 2009 to have won without driving a Red Bull or a Mercedes.

Reflecting on his year, Norris explained how he had begun to change his approach to the championship upon realising that his initial approach wasn’t working.

“It started after I had that kind of bad run in race two, three, four, five, six, that kind of area,” he told the media, including PlanetF1.com, in Abu Dhabi.

“Or certainly when it was like, “Alright, my way is not working. I’ve got to understand things differently. I’ve got to speak to more people. I’ve got to understand what I’m thinking, why I’m thinking it. Why am I doing this? Why am I getting tense in qualifying? Why am I making the decisions that I’m making?” Whatever it may be.

“Certainly, the bad run of results and lack of performance – not speed, because I think the speed’s always there – but lack of putting things together when I had the capability of putting things together, allowed or opened up the doors to go and understand: ‘Okay, I need to do more than just try again next weekend. I need to try and understand things on a deeper level.’

“Mentally, that opened up understanding myself more, understanding things more at a championship level. That’s the level I’ve got to be at.  They are world champions. And yes, certainly the struggles turned into strength.

“So I would say, if I didn’t have those struggles at the beginning and then had the weakness at the end, would I have caught on to those things as quickly? Probably not.

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So I was thankful that I had some of the tough moments early on and managed to turn them around.

“When I got in that kind of good rhythm in the last three months, almost when there’s been more pressure than ever, was almost when I felt most comfortable and most confident into qualifying, you know, I could go from chatting to my engineers and having a fun time with my mechanics to going out and getting pole a few minutes later.

“So, yeah, the struggle at the beginning really allowed me to unlock my potential later on.”

Norris’ championship victory came in a season after the British driver had first become a race winner and title challenger, but appeared cowed by going up against Verstappen in 2024.

Lando Norris vs Oscar Piastri: McLaren head-to-head scores for F1 2025

F1 2025: Head-to-head qualifying statistics between teammates

F1 2025: Head-to-head race statistics between team-mates

According to McLaren team boss Andrea Stella, he could see that Norris climbed a major psychological hurdle during ’24 that strengthened him for this year’s fight.

“To compete at this level, the only way to stay in the quest is to keep evolving continuously,” he said.

“If I look at Lando, definitely, there was a lot that was taken away from the quest last year, even if it didn’t go to the last race.

“I think Lando elevated his sense of status, like ‘I can compete with Max’.

“There were some learning points, like Austria [2024], which was a tough one [where Norris and Verstappen collided – editor]. But this season, there was another important turning point, in my view, which is the way Lando responded to the difficulties we had at the start of the season.

“There was the start of a process, which was structured. It was holistic. It involved personal development, professional driving, and racecraft.

“I think it makes me particularly glad that Lando could capitalise on this, because this has been something that, not necessarily, I’ve seen many times before, in terms of the amount of work the people involved, and the rate of development.

“So I think this has made Lando even capable, and this is valid for both our drivers, of absorbing a couple of tough moments, like when we needed to tell the drivers that we got disqualified [after Las Vegas], that was tough because they had done the job, but we had not, and they lost a lot of points.

“In a similar way, absorbing the fact that, in Qatar, we had a moment where we could have done better, but we never pointed the finger at the team.

“So there are so many aspects in which both drivers have grown, and especially this constant support to the team, not only is the one that makes me most proud of our two guys, but I think it is also the most important for the overall success.”