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McLaren boss Andrea Stella has stated that the team would not have wanted Lando Norris to do anything differently on the occasions where he has gone wheel-to-wheel with Max Verstappen in 2024 – but also acknowledged that the squad “regret” missing out on points during the title rivals’ tense battle at the Austrian Grand Prix.
Norris had been chasing Verstappen down for the lead as the race at the Red Bull Ring entered into its latter stages, but the scrap came to a head when the pair made contact, resulting in both sustaining punctures and limping back to the pits.
READ MORE: McLaren boss Stella says ‘it’s all to play for’ in title battles despite Norris losing ground to Verstappen in Brazil
While Verstappen was able to rejoin and finish the Grand Prix in fifth – despite also receiving a 10-second time penalty for the collision – Norris retired in the pits, meaning that he had gone from a potentially very high points haul to scoring nothing. In the races since then, Norris’s gap to Verstappen at the top of the drivers’ standings closed in, before the Red Bull driver’s stunning efforts in Brazil increased the gap to 62 points.
Asked ahead of the Sao Paulo Grand Prix about how the Briton was dealing with the pressure of being in a championship fight – and whether he had grown as a driver – Stella responded: “Definitely.
“I think Lando is coping with this situation of being in the fight for the championship in a way that we are enjoying, first of all. He’s now a very mature driver. [He is] fast, the race craft keeps improving all the time.
“The attitude, the learning from every situation, which we can appreciate almost on a race-by-race timescale. I think Lando is definitely now a mature driver to succeed in this kind of fight, which is a fight against one of the best drivers, I think, in the history of Formula 1.
“Looking at the titles that Max has achieved, then I think this is universally recognised. So we just keep telling Lando all the time, keep doing what we are doing, let’s keep improving all the time, let’s become the best version of ourselves, race after race.”
READ MORE: Norris rues ‘unlucky’ pit stop timing in Sao Paulo as he vows team will ‘keep our heads down’ despite title setback
Pushed on whether he would have preferred Norris to change his approach to those particularly close on-track fights with Verstappen, Stella continued: “Not at all. When I say keep doing what we are doing, I obviously mean this in a broad sense, but definitely I also mean this in a very specific sense.
“I think we got some learning, for instance, from Austria. We got a little too close. And the points we’re missing from Austria, because of having had a proper collision and then being knocked out of the race, are points that we regret.
“We don’t really regret many other points in this season, potentially the one in Austin, where we still believe that the final classification isn’t correct [after Norris received a five-second time penalty and dropped from third to fourth], but we respect the work of the stewards. We have tried with a right of review to find some correction of that situation that happened in Austin. This didn’t happen. We move on.
“So I think from Lando’s point of view, that’s the way it should be going racing. Lando reflects, also, in the way he goes racing, our own values. We race fair, we race in a correct way, we race in a sportsmanlike way.
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“And then ultimately in this kind of close fight, there’s a third party that is the stewarding. We trust the stewarding. I think in Mexico this worked very well and we had good racing.”
After Verstappen’s victory in the Sao Paulo Grand Prix, the Dutchman has again extended his advantage over Norris with three races remaining. McLaren, meanwhile, remain at the top of the constructors’ table, 36 points clear of Ferrari.
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