Breaking down Norris’ path to unthinkable F1 glory. It’s not as ‘stupid’ as you might think

The Dutch Grand Prix will be remembered as a watershed moment in 2024.

McLaren, only 18 months ago the slowest team in Formula 1, stamped its authority all over a circuit that had previously been a Red Bull Racing stronghold. Lando Norris easily dispatched Max Verstappen, previously undefeated at home.

Momentum is with McLaren, while RBR looks more vulnerable than it has for years.

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But of all the interesting things to happen in Zandvoort, the most fascinating took place off the track some time after the chequered flag fell.

While the constructors championship is very much a live fight, for weeks the team and Norris himself have batted away talk that the drivers title is in its sights.

Verstappen’s seven wins from the first 10 rounds earnt him an enviable place at the top of the title table. While Sergio Pérez’s underperformance has allowed McLaren to undertake a controlled demolition of RBR’s points lead, Verstappen has been performing steadily enough to minimise damage to his own standing.

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But the ease of Norris’s victory has changed the paradigm.

For the first time this season, the team is open to talk — cautious, carefully worded talk — about powering Norris to individual title.

“We need to keep the focus. We need to think this is possible,” McLaren’s forever level-headed team boss Andrea Stella said, per Autosport. “I have to say today is very encouraging from a performance point of view.”

Encouraging is an understatement.

Norris sealed the deal in Zandvoort with the largest winning margin of the season to date, his gap to Verstappen clocking in at 22.896 seconds.

Considering he took the lead on lap 18 of 72, his pace advantage stood at a hefty 0.42 seconds per lap.

Verstappen clearly committed to securing second once he’d been passed, but Norris also had pace in reserve. That he snatched the bonus point for fastest lap on the very last lap of the race, when his hard tyres were 44 laps old, hinted at the speed he chose not to unleash.

“Alarming result,” is how Red Bull motorsport adviser Helmut Marko described the race.

“As Max said before the summer break, the team has to work harder and must find improvements, because like that his championship is in threat,” he told Autosport.

And when asked, for the avoidance of doubt, which championship he thought was under threat, his answer was clear: “Both, both, both.”

It’s a remarkable admission that puts Norris’s already imposing result into sharper focus.

The Briton’s domination in the Netherlands was important for more than just validating McLaren’s progress with its car, upgrades to which were clearly super effective this weekend.

It also kept his championship hopes entirely in his own hands.

THE IRON RULE OF ARITHMETIC

Victory with the point for fastest lap reduced Norris’s deficit to Verstappen to 70 points. Whichever way you cut it, it’s a large and improbable margin.

But Norris can overhaul that difference without needing other results to fall his way — just.

With nine grands prix and three sprints remaining, 258 points are still up for grabs.

The winner of each grand prix claims 25 points. A driver who finishes inside the top 10 with the fastest lap can take home a bonus point. A sprint victory is worth eight points.

Norris will need to outscore Verstappen by 7.8 points per round to nose ahead at the end of the season-closing Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

The difference between first and second in a grand prix is seven points. The difference between first and second in a sprint is one point.

If Norris were to win all nine grands prix and all three sprints with Verstappen in second, Verstappen would still win the championship by four points.

If Norris were to win all nine grands prix and all three sprints with Verstappen in second but also score four bonus points for fastest lap, he would win the title on countback.

Other permutations are possible so long as the threshold of 7.8 points per round is met.

It’s the long shot of all long shots, so much so that Norris thinks it’s “stupid to think of” just yet — though he admitted that winning the drivers title was still his goal for the season.

“I’ve been fighting for the championship since the first race of the year,” he said. “There’s no sudden decision of now.

“I need to do better. I’ve been working hard the whole year and I’m still 70 points behind Max, so it’s pretty stupid to think of anything at the minute.

“I just take one race at a time and just keep doing what I’m doing now because there’s no point to think ahead and think of the rest.

“I don’t care about it at the minute. I’m just focused on one race at a time, so it’s not a question that I need to get asked every single weekend.”

BUT THERE’S A PRECEDENT

Nine victories from nine races — plus three sprints, plus four fastest laps — is, to say the least, a big ask.

Fortunately for Norris, however, it wouldn’t be unprecedented.

“In the drivers championship we definitely wanted to keep our head and our focus on the fact that it was possible,” Stella said. “We even talked and looked at what [Sebastian] Vettel did in 2013 and we said, ‘We may do the same. Why not?’.”

Stella was referring to Vettel’s spectacular nine-race victory streak to close the 2013 campaign and win his final championship. The run of wins also happened to include four fastest laps.

It was at the time an unprecedented achievement, at least in the modern era.

The previous record of seven had been jointly held by Nico Rosberg and Michael Schumacher, while Alberto Ascari is variously credited to have won either seven or nine in a row across the 1952 and 1953 seasons depending on whether the championship-status but poorly regarded 1953 Indianapolis 500 is included.

Vettel’s record was subsequently eclipsed by Verstappen, who won 10 straight races through the middle of last season. The Dutchman then won another nine in a row across the 2023 and 2024 seasons.

Evidently it’s possible, particularly in the modern era, with so many grands prix packed into relatively short time frames, allowing purple patches of form to pay greater dividends.

THE OPPORTUNITIES

Beyond having what appears to be the quickest car in the sport, Norris will be hoping to count on several other potential advantages to stack the odds in his favour.

The first obvious hope — though no driver will claim to wish for it — is that Verstappen suffers a technical retirement.

For the sake of easy mathematics, let’s say Norris wins this weekend while Verstappen fails to finish. The gap would be slashed to as low as 44 points with eight rounds remaining.

Suddenly Norris’s target would shrink to needing 5.5 points per round — still a tall order, but one that allows more flexibility in results.

A margin of less than two wins, we’d be talking about Norris being within striking distance rather than struggling against the odds.

Short of that, Norris would need to hope for circumstances to trip Verstappen into lower scoring weekends.

One potentially significant opportunity is that Verstappen could be liable for another grid penalty later this season.

The Dutchman suffered what’s been reported to be a complete power unit failure during practice at the Canadian Grand Prix.

It forced Red Bull Racing to unseal a brand-new power unit much earlier in the season than usual, butting Verstappen up against his season limit of engine parts.

He tipped over that limit in Belgium, where he took his fifth internal combustion engine, one more than is allowed.

But he’s also at his maximum allocation for turbochargers, MGUs — motor generator units, the hybrid components of the power unit — batteries and control electronics.

Requiring more of any of those parts would incur a 10-place grid penalty.

Norris will also be pencilling in some upcoming races as big opportunities to deal heavy damage to Verstappen based on Red Bull Racing’s past performances.

We know this year’s RB20 struggles badly at street circuits, where it labours over slow corners and on high kerbs.

After Italy this weekend comes street tracks in Azerbaijan and Singapore, the latter being the only circuit at which RBR team failed to win last season.

McLaren will also expect to do especially well in Qatar again this year, it being a circuit that should perfectly suit its car characteristics.

Finally, there’s the broader form guide that could assist Norris in romping to victories with big margins.

While Mercedes showed poorly in the Netherlands, it’s expected to bounce back at subsequent races where a more typical weekend build-up will allow it to better hone its car.

Ferrari likewise keeps threatening to rejoin the lead battle, and its race pace on Sunday showed it’s not just fanciful thinking.

Norris will also have teammate Oscar Piastri to rely upon for interference — the Australian likely would have finished second ahead of Verstappen in Zandvoort had he not also suffered a slow start that bottled him up in the first stint.

If these teams and Piastri can be relied upon to get in Verstappen’s way, Norris might be able to make up more ground more quickly, taking some of the pressure off the need to win every race.

WHAT McLAREN MUST OVERCOME

But even if the points burden were to lighten through circumstance, Norris and McLaren would still need a mighty run of results to close the gap completely.

It will require perfect execution week in and week out.

That’s something McLaren can’t guarantee. In fact recent history suggests it’s something it’s struggling to achieve.

“We’ve had on average the best car,” Norris said of the season so far. “We probably should have won two, three more races as a team, but we didn’t.

“We should have won and we didn’t, and it’s because we’ve not done a good enough job. I didn’t do a good enough job.

“It’s still a long way to go, so we still have to keep working hard, because this is just Zandvoort. Monza is a completely different circuit, so we’ll keep our heads down and keep chipping away.”

There’s little doubt McLaren has a faster car than Red Bull Racing, even if there’s uncertainty about how much faster it is. But so far it’s yet to prove that it can be the better team — the more instinctive operator, the sharper strategist, the slicker set of mechanics.

It’s no surprise that Vettel and Verstappen’s victory streaks were both powered by Red Bull Racing.

Verstappen has already won three races this season at tracks his car wasn’t quickest. He won in Imola by virtue of a brilliant pole position, but in Canada he outwitted pole-getter George Russell and Norris, and in Spain he was better than Norris off the line and Red Bull Racing was quicker than McLaren in the pit stops.

These three wins have contributed valuably to his title lead.

“We’re going to give our best, but we’re fighting Red Bull,” Stella told Sky Sports. “They’ve been dominant in previous seasons.

“For us it’s just exciting that we’re in this position to fight them, and it looks like we have the performance to give it a go.”

It’ll take both Norris and McLaren operating at 100 per cent of their potential for the next three and a half months to have any hope of triggering a title upset.

If Norris does manage the almost impossible, you can be certain he’ll have earnt it.