Lando Norris 'up there with Michael Schumacher' despite zero F1 race wins

31 January 2024 , 06:00

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Lando Norris remains without an F1 race win after more than 100 attempts (Image: Getty Images)

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

And that is saying something, given the array of talented drivers the Italian has had the pleasure of calling colleagues in the past. His time with Ferrari alone saw spells with several world champions.

That includes Michael Schumacher - Stella was the seven-time world champion's performance engineer at the height of his success in the early 2000s. He later became a race engineer for Kimi Raikkonen and performed the same role also for Fernando Alonso after that.

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.

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"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."

Speaking after signing his new deal, Norris admitted he had also held talks with other interested teams - but insisted he never seriously considered approaches from the likes of Red Bull and Ferrari. "Everyone speaks to everyone and every driver speaks to every team - it's not in terms of just sorting contracts," he said.

"It's what can one team offer you, and what can another team offer you, and things like that. It's the same with every driver. Everyone speaks to every team on what could we potentially do one day, but nothing ever progressed more than that, basically. So yeah, it was shut down quite quickly."

Daniel Moxon