Lando Norris ‘up there with Michael Schumacher’ and F1 greats despite zero race wins

Lando Norris is widely regarded as a future F1 world champion and is key to McLaren’s hopes of success but, despite more than 100 attempts, he has yet to win a race

McLaren chief Andrea Stella is adamant that star driver Lando Norris is among the very best Formula 1 racers he has ever worked with.

The fact that the Italian has had the opportunity to work with many skillful drivers in the past is noteworthy. During his tenure with Ferrari, he collaborated with multiple world champions.

Michael Schumacher, along with other individuals, was included in Stella’s work as a performance engineer during his prime in the early 2000s when he secured the world championship title seven times. Following this period, Stella transitioned to being a race engineer for Kimi Raikkonen, and subsequently held the same position for Fernando Alonso.

Stella is now team principal at McLaren and was delighted with news that Norris had signed a new deal with the team. Commenting on that, the Italian claimed his 24-year-old superstar is up there with any of those great names.

“Lando definitely stands together with them,” he said. “It is the same category, the same kind of world championship material, the underlying talent, the mindset, the work ethos. It’s all ready to go. But, at the same time, when you think about champions, there is a characteristic of champions in that they only get better.

“Real champions, they seem to just improve year by year. And I think that’s the case because they use the intelligence, the ethos, and they get the best people around them. They do whatever it takes to get better and better because the sport gets only more and more competitive.”

Norris hit the ground running in F1 when he made his debut for McLaren in 2019, after having impressed in the junior categories. Promoting him to a race seat as a teenager was a simple enough decision in the end, while Stella is even more delighted with the progress the Briton has made since.

He added: “Definitely, we have all the raw material, which we saw already when Lando was doing the free practice one [sessions] with us. It was very evident in 2018 and then it kept growing. It’s there, we just need to keep growing year after year like every champion does. But we are extremely happy and committed to Lando, in this respect.”

After finalizing his new contract, Norris acknowledged that he had engaged in discussions with other teams that showed interest in him. However, he emphasized that he never seriously contemplated offers from prestigious teams such as Red Bull and Ferrari. Norris stated, “It is common for everyone to communicate with each other, and every driver talks with various teams. It is not solely focused on contract negotiations.”

“What a team can provide and what another team can offer, and similar aspects, are all factors to consider. This applies to every driver. Each driver discusses with multiple teams about potential opportunities, but it rarely goes beyond initial conversations. So, it was swiftly rejected in this case.”