Lando Norris expects he and McLaren to improve in 2020 but won’t “overhype” expectations.
The youngest driver on the grid impressed in his rookie year by keeping teammate Carlos Sainz on his toes, with reliability issues at key moments largely to blame for the 47-point gap between them.
Now Norris is looking to build on that strong foundation he built and certainly heads into the new season without the doubts he carried into his first race in 2019.
“I want to say I’m more confident in my own driving because it’s my second year in Formula 1, so I feel now a lot more confident,” Crash.net quote him as saying at the recent Autosport International event.
“But also the team I think have done a very good job, working on particularly the areas that we were not good in last year, that we were quite weak in, which was almost every corner.
“It’s trying to work on those areas and, from the results that I’ve seen, it’s looking positive,” Lando encouraged. “It’s going in the right direction, but we still need more to be really competitive.”
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Indeed, 2020 could be a tricky year for McLaren with little chance of closing the gap to the top three teams but every midfield outfit keen to beat them after finishing ‘best of the rest’ in fourth in the Constructors’ standings last season
“Compared to what I was last year, if you asked me that question, I can definitely say now that I am much more confident, but I can’t say that we’re going to be on the podium or wherever,” Norris continued
“I want to say we’re top 10, for sure, but anything more than that, I can’t really say.
“I’m not going to say we’re going to be winning races this season. I would love to, but I don’t want to overhype anything. I think we’ve got to be realistic.
“We’ve got to be saying we want to take a step forward. I think we can be confident in saying that, but how big of a step is unknown comparing to the other teams.”
At this stage of the year then, the 20-year-old is simply hoping for a repeat of the surprise McLaren got 12 months ago.
“In 2018, we were going into 2019 and we knew the car was going to be better. We knew the car was looking good in the wind tunnel and so on,” he explained.
“But then when we went to Barcelona, it was better than what we thought as a team. So I’m hoping it’s going to be like that this season.
“The car’s looking a bit better. So hopefully when we go to Barcelona and we do our first test, it’s just going to be amazing.”