Perfect season would not have been enough to beat Verstappen to the F1 title

Lando Norris doubted he would have won the 2024 Formula 1 title even with a perfect season, but was nonetheless proud of McLaren for putting themselves in contention during the season.

Norris’ dwindling title chances ended at the Las Vegas Grand Prix when he needed to edge out Max Verstappen by three points to take the fight to the following round in Qatar.

Red Bull driver Verstappen finished fifth ahead of Norris to complete his title defense as the Briton struggled with front grain over the race distance, although a late switch to softs helped him push the fastest lap point.

Norris felt that it had been a great achievement for McLaren to climb up the pecking order to regular victory, but said that even with perfection in every race, Verstappen would still have been too difficult to beat over the course of the season.

“I’m very proud of the whole team for fighting for so long, for starting to catch up and catching up as much as we did. We were the fourth best team at the beginning of the year,” Norris said.

“Red Bull has never been the fourth best team or the worst, let’s say, ever. We just had too big a deficit to make up from the beginning of the season and we couldn’t because they have been too strong.

“Next year we go into the season with a car we think we can win a championship with from the first round and we haven’t been able to do that in the last six years, so I’m excited about that.

“But I’m proud of what we’ve achieved. My first win in Formula 1, my first three (wins), nobody else is there fighting him. It’s been me and it’s been McLaren.

“Could we have done some things better? Absolutely. Do I think we could have won the championship even with a perfect season? I don’t. So I’m happy to finish second.”

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing RB20, Lando Norris, McLaren MCL38, Yuki Tsunoda, RB F1 Team VCARB 01

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

With McLaren’s focus now on securing the constructors’ title, Norris said he was more concerned about the difficult race McLaren faced in Vegas rather than being pleased that Mercedes helped cushion the damage on Ferrari with its 1-2 finish .

He also reckoned the race showed McLaren defied popular belief that it had the best car in F1 and that he couldn’t get anything more out of it.

“I don’t think about those things (Mercedes beat Ferrari), I think about how bad our car was today. That’s what worries me, not Mercedes being strong. It was how bad we’ve been all weekend .

“Obviously we have a lot of work to do with our car. It’s too hard to drive. It doesn’t work in these conditions.

“It doesn’t work at many other tracks where we’ve had similar conditions, but we’ve been able to get everything out of it sometimes, even when people think we’ve had the best car, we absolutely haven’t.

“We still won some of those races and those were great weekends. But this weekend, even though I feel like I drove pretty well, I couldn’t get anything more out of it and if I tried I probably would have finished up in the wall somewhere.”