Norris on Ricciardo's issues: 'That's life – you adapt to the car'

“I guess I’m surprised because when Daniel came into the team, of course, everyone expected more. I’m sure he expected more from himself. So, when you look at it that way, you are surprised.

“It’s not me having a dig or anything, but when you look at the results, if you want two guys to be at the same level and so on, then in a way, you’re not surprised. It’s just hard to know when to call it, I guess, which is what they’ve done.”

Asked if he’d been involved in any discussions about Ricciardo’s future he adds: “It makes no difference to me. It’s not my job, it’s his career, not my career.”

Given how competitive he has been over the past couple of years Norris has watched the situation unfold with some bemusement, sitting in team press briefings while Ricciardo has fielded endless questions about his poor form and explanation of how he couldn’t get on with either the MCL35M or its very different successor. Norris makes it clear that it’s not been easy for him either.

“I think the only thing that people get extremely wrong is any opinion thinking that the car is designed around me, or suiting me more than it is him,” he notes.

“At the beginning of the year, it suited him more than it did for me. If I could choose an exact driving style for me to have, and for a car to suit, then this car doesn’t give me anything of what I want to do. And therefore the job as a driver is to adapt to that, and just do the best you can with that car.

“Which is what I’m doing, and maybe easier for me to do than it is for Daniel, I don’t know if that’s the reason. For every driver it’s just adapting to the car you’ve got in the end of the day.

“And the car I have now is not one which is designed around me in any way, it’s just the one that they can make the quickest as possible in the wind tunnel, and that’s what I got. But that’s life, it’s the same with every team, it’s the same with everyone, that the car is just the quickest car that they can make.

“And then it’s the driver’s job to go out and perform the best they can in that car.”

So do they have different ideas about what they want from the car?

Ricciardo has used the word “weird” to describe the behaviour of the McLaren, and his predecessor Carlos Sainz expressed similar sentiments. Norris acknowledges that the current machine has its quirks.

“Yeah, it’s just like certain things you expect as a driver,” he says. “You expect that when you turn the wheel like this or when you do certain things you kind of expect or you feel like you should know exactly what’s going to happen.

“But that isn’t always the case, like sometimes you would brake less and the car rotates more, or grips more. And other times you brake more, and then that also does it. It’s very confusing at times. A particular corner it you have to do it one way the next corner you have to drive it in a different way.

“It’s not like every corner this is exactly how you have to drive which I think is what makes it so difficult. Because to find the limit on every corner you have to change your driving style for every corner anyway. Like I guess it’s probably easier for Daniel to say because he came from Renault and from Red Bull.

“As a driver, you always have certain expectations for when you steer this amount, the car rotates this amount and then you throttle on it does this and whatever. But just at times, it always just feels a little bit disconnected, like you expect to do one thing, and it doesn’t quite do it.

“So then go on your throttle or your brake or whatever and something doesn’t feel connected, let’s say. But then you just have to, I guess adapt to it. I guess that’s simple as saying that, but you have to adapt to that, and make the most of it and just kind of figure out how to drive the car the best way like that.”

The bottom line is that whatever the issues, Norris has dealt with them much more successfully, and consistently, than his team mate.

“The thing is during different weekends, the car changes,” he says.

He acknowledges that there are always going to be times when Ricciardo’s data is worth a study.

“Certain things in a particular corner that Daniel’s done very well and I struggled to just do the same as him. That’s just because we’ve driven different cars we’ve been brought up differently, and we’ve learned different driving styles as you grow up.

“The one that he’s embedded in himself and is natural for him to go and do is slightly different to my natural driving style that I go out and do. So of course, to change a timing of everything and how you drive for one particular corner because it suits someone so well…

“The main thing is looking at the data, that’s the easiest thing that you can relate to, because you’re comparing to everything that you’re consciously doing, but actually going out and doing exactly what that person is doing is not an easy thing to do.

“So even if any driver on the grid says this is what I do, it’s not as simple as just going out and doing it, because that’s not how it works. I would say it’s like, you describe your feeling of what happens to a corner, and you put that with what you see on the data from the inputs, the steering wheel, braking, throttle. But that’s it.”

Officially McLaren is saying nothing about its plans to run Oscar Piastri next year. However, Norris has an interesting insight into how the team looked after him in his rookie year.

“I think it’s a team which is very willing to do whatever they can to help. With what they’ve done with Daniel over the last few years, we’ve changed everything on the car to try and adapt to his driving style and to whatever driver it is.

“Coming into F1, I felt the pressure of being an F1 driver. But I think what the team was very good at is not making you feel like there’s too much pressure being a McLaren F1 driver.

“They’ll do whatever they can to also make you feel more comfortable, whether that’s with media and marketing and all of this stuff. Whatever will make the driver perform better then they’ll try and do that.

“But the most important thing is just the atmosphere. Everyone knows each other very well. Everyone’s very helpful, very friendly. And, of course, I’ll be biased by saying McLaren are very good at that, because I’ve not been with another team. But I do believe they are better than probably most other teams in that regard.”