Karun Chandhok: Team Norris – the people who helped Lando become F1 champion

This year’s F1 World Championship will be known as the ‘shoulda, woulda, coulda’ season. All three of the title contenders had tough times and it was by no means a perfect season. What if Red Bull improved the car earlier in the season as, after all, Max Verstappen outscored Lando Norris by 86 points in the second half of the year? What if Oscar Piastri didn’t have his strange slump around Austin, Mexico and Brazil where he lost 46 points to Norris across just those three weekends? What if Norris didn’t make errors in five of the first 10 qualifying sessions and his engine didn’t go pop in Zandvoort? What if McLaren didn’t have the double disqualification in Vegas or the strategic error in Qatar? There were so many twists and turns that we didn’t know how this was going to play out until Abu Dhabi.

Through it all, Norris emerged as the 35th different world drivers’ champion in F1’s 75th anniversary. All three of them would have been worthy winners and had periods where they were superb. I like the fact that Lando is still the charming, cheeky, grounded young lad which is a massive credit to his parents Adam and Cisca.

Unlike someone like George Russell or Verstappen who always spoke and behaved with incredible self-assurance, Lando always seemed a bit less self-confident. His father Adam put together a good structure of key people who have been with Lando right from his karting days. Mark Berryman has guided Lando throughout his career and his performance coach Jon Malvern knows him incredibly well and they are his closest confidants when he’s at the track.

“In the early years, Lando needed more hand-holding than the team recognised”

I always believe that human beings – especially athletes – need people that they can trust to call them out and be honest with them, but with the undertone that they are firmly in your corner and want you to do better – not in a tabloid criticism sort of way. When Lando was making errors at the start of the season in qualifying, this group of people were there to support him, remind him that he didn’t need to chase an extra 10m under braking for the hairpin and give him the belief that he was lacking by saying “you are fast enough to win this – stop trying so hard in areas where you don’t need to”.

If I had to pick two key people at McLaren who have been vital for the ‘evolution of Lando’ from debutant to world champion, it would be his race engineer Will Joseph and his performance engineer Andrew Jarvis. For any racing driver, the relationship they have with their race engineer and performance engineer is absolutely critical to success. They are the ones who are part-engineers and part-psychologists. They need to be able to read the drivers’ minds and find a way to decipher what they are thinking while feeding them bits of information or encouragement as and when needed.

I have spent a lot of time listening to the team radio chatter between Lando and the pitwall over the years. Will Joseph had come off the back of a bruising period of being barked at by an increasingly frustrated Fernando Alonso so having the opportunity to shape and mould a young, enthusiastic and likeable rookie must have been a breath of fresh air. But in the early years, it seemed to me that Lando perhaps needed more hand-holding than the team recognised.

There were various instances of questions being asked of him where the answer would be a “dunno” or a “you decide” and it took some time to build up the way that they communicate effectively.

The Russian Grand Prix in 2021 was a great example. Norris had done a superb job to take the first pole position of his career and led the race with great assurance. However there was a sting in the tail with rain coming towards the latter stages when he had Lewis Hamilton right behind him. The radio calls that day put the emphasis on a 21-year-old chasing his first ever win, with the pressure of a seven-time world champion behind him. The team were asking Lando to make the calls on whether he was happy to stay out on slicks or not and ultimately, he and they got it wrong.

Today Lando would of course be in a better position to make those calls but the team have also learned about giving him the right bits of information to help him make those calls, or sometimes, just take the decision-making power away from him. Little changes in the way that Will communicates such as “Lando, if we do X, then Y and Z will happen. Do you think it’s a good idea?” has just improved the way they can make these high-pressure decisions.

Trusting in each other to dig out of a hole when things don’t go to plan is also extremely important. Think of Hungary this year when, on the opening lap, Lando got boxed in and dropped to fifth. Will presented an alternative option of a one-stop strategy and walked him through the implications before giving the right encouragement his driver needed to execute it. That I believe was a key weekend just before the summer break to give Lando the confidence he needed for the second half of the season where he has been superb and earned the title.