Lando Norris must improve his wheel-to-wheel combat to beat Max Verstappen

Verstappen is the more calculating racer and Norris is not helped by an indecisive team on the pit wall

Lando Norris again came out second best in an on-track duel with Max Verstappen, picking up a five-second penalty and losing more ground to his title rival in Austin. His McLaren team too could have handled the situation better, but again were indecisive on the pit wall.
On the crucial incident on lap 52, I think Norris’s penalty was fair. Yes, both cars went off the track at turn 12 but Norris and the team should know that overtaking when outside track limits is illegal and that they would get a penalty for it. True, there was an element of Verstappen pushing him off but Norris should have either abandoned the move sooner and prepared to attack again or McLaren should have told him to hand the place back immediately, giving him the opportunity to give it another go.
The incident characterises weaknesses that have cropped up throughout 2024 both for driver and the team. Firstly, as quick a driver as Norris is, his skills in wheel-to-wheel battle are letting him down. How often does Norris come out on top in situations like this? He was overtaken by team-mate Oscar Piastri in Monza in September and also ended up retiring when he crashed with Verstappen in Austria in June. Raw pace will get you in the position to challenge for victories but, unless your car has a decisive advantage, you need the racecraft to turn that into wins and championships.
The CONTROVERSAL moment Lando got ahead of Max for P3 ⚔️ pic.twitter.com/vtlUdJdyxu
Verstappen is a world champion and a hard racer in the ruthless mould of Ayrton Senna or Michael Schumacher. Norris does not seem to be as cool and calculating in the cockpit as he needs to be, or when in a wheel-to-wheel racing situation he doesn’t have the mental capacity left over to analyse the situation and come up with a solution.
Going back to the start of the race, pole man Norris unnecessarily left a car’s width at the inside of turn one which Verstappen duly took. The uncompromising Red Bull driver then ran Norris wide at the exit and the McLaren dropped from first to fourth. You simply do not leave the door ajar for Verstappen like that – Norris should have closed the gap when he had the chance. Norris also seems to be lacking the ability to plan the next move and needs to be able to think about more than just one corner.
Looking at the controversial incident towards the end of the race, the chances of going around the outside of Verstappen and making that move stick – and being given the space to do so – are close to zero. Norris, then, should have anticipated that and favoured the switchback, going deeper and braking later to position himself for the corner exit or even the next set of corners. Instead he was forced wide, put his boot down and took the position illegally.
McLaren, too, could have handled the situation better. Their biggest weakness this season has been indecision on the pit wall and again it cost them on Sunday. I would have immediately asked Norris to hand the position back, but McLaren seem reluctant to tell their drivers what to do.
That has also been evident in their handling of team orders in the second-half of the season. Even when it was clear that Norris had the better title chances, they fudged several on-track decisions. Perhaps this is as a way of avoiding attributing blame if something goes wrong but this leads to more responsibility for the drivers on track, which is rarely a good thing.
Whenever I have been involved on the pit wall, we have always worked via the race engineer for the basic strategy decisions during the race. That is the most direct and sensible route to take. The downside of this for bigger and trickier decisions is that the engineer and driver are a unit and have their own egos and interests. Every driver and engineer wants to beat their team-mate and if the total team points end up the same, sometimes their decisions do not completely align with the team’s best interests.
You can sometimes pass difficult decisions and communications through the race engineer but if the engineer is unclear or woolly in what they tell the driver it creates problems. This is exactly what we saw in Budapest earlier this year when Norris was in a lengthy debate with his team who asked him to move over for team-mate Piastri.
In these situations team principal Andrea Stella, or someone else senior, needs to get on the radio, assert their authority and tell their driver what is happening. We have seen other teams like Mercedes do this in the past. McLaren seem to want to leave it to the race engineer.
The progress that McLaren have made with their car in the last 18 months is impressive. Now they must start making that progress operationally if they want to make the most of their package.