How Norris shrugged off two touches with the wall to dominate in Singapore

“No way!” When the highlights clips started to air in the cooldown room, Max Verstappen was amazed at Lando Norris’s luck in avoiding damage with a Turn 14 lock-up that resulted in the slightest contact with the barrier.

His surprise was accompanied by Norris and Oscar Piastri making the customary noise associated with watching someone navigate a tiny multi-storey car park in an SUV, as the Singapore Grand Prix race winner relived a squeaky-bum moment that yielded nothing more than barely cosmetic front wing damage.

However, this wasn’t Norris’s only brush with the wall in his otherwise dominant display in Singapore. He sustained another in the final 20 laps of the race, perhaps one that would have catapulted his heart a little further into his mouth; a brush with his right-rear wheel at the protruding right-hand side barrier at Turn 10 might have woken him up ever so slightly.

After all, Norris had touched that wall last year en route to finishing second – and watched George Russell behind him do the same, where the Mercedes driver came to rest in the opposite tyre barrier in the latter stages of the 2023 race.

Aside from the moments that jolted the McLaren pitwall – and Norris – out of the intoxicating heat-induced stupor, the Briton produced a crushing drive. It firmly put his stamp into a title fight, albeit for one he remains an outside bet.

“I was definitely pushing,” Norris asserted. “Probably too much, hence the mistakes I was making, or the two mistakes I made with the wall, but otherwise things were going well.”

Although the final 20.9-second margin between he and Verstappen was not the nearly-30s zenith of the margin between first and second, it still underlined the merits of Norris’s drive. It was almost Verstappen-esque in magnitude.

Norris finally nailed a start from pole position - leading at the end of the opening lap for the first time in five grand prix starts from top spot

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

At the fifth time of asking (sixth if one counts sprints) this year, Norris not only preserved his pole position into the first corner, but also finished the opening lap with the lead still intact.

There was no Verstappen assault on the inside line into Turn 1, nor a later attempt at a pass to deprive the McLaren driver of yet another lead on lap one. Norris had absconded like a scalded feline off the line and immediately set to work on breaking the DRS margin.

“You gain confidence, and you gain familiarity with starting from pole position, and [you gain] understanding, even in terms of territorial defence, what you need to do, even to dissuade people for going [for the lead],” McLaren team principal Andrea Stella reflected. "So, I think this is part of the journey, and it's just good that we are now having to face this kind of opportunity.’

"That was taking the piss, although I shouldn't say that in any official capacity! The pace he [Norris] had in hand on that [medium] tyre at that point in time was… well, at that point we've conceded the race on pace" Christian Horner

And Norris’s preservation of the lead was done in a well-controlled manner. He opened that second’s advantage over Verstappen, matched the Dutchman’s pace for a few laps to bring the medium-compound Pirellis in slowly, and then started to open the taps to demonstrate the McLaren MCL38’s searing pace.

This came at race engineer Will Joseph’s command, who asked Norris to “use the pace to get a five-second gap by the mid-teens” to cover off any threats of an undercut, or a safety car. Norris happily obliged and rather exceeded those expectations – rather than the ‘mid-teens’ target, he’d already almost managed it by the end of the 10th lap. He was well over a second per lap faster than Verstappen; where the Red Bull driver was ensconced in the high-1m37s, Norris was in the mid-to-high 1m36s. And consistently so.

Norris did not relent in this early phase either, and the gap continued to swell. It took just over 15 laps to push it north of 10s, and another 11 to clear the 20s marker. It had looked pretty much like a foregone conclusion at this point, comparable to a common Verstappen victory as seen across 2023.

The call for Norris to pick up the pace, per Red Bull’s Christian Horner, was an unwelcome one for the reigning constructors’ champion. “That was taking the piss, although I shouldn't say that in any official capacity! The pace he had in hand on that [medium] tyre at that point in time was… well, at that point we've conceded the race on pace.”

Red Bull boss Horner suggested McLaren's radio interaction with Norris was "taking the piss"

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Norris was set to break past a 25s margin by lap 29, but for the first of his near-misses. Later admitting that he was perhaps caught out by the tyres running out of life, he locked up into the Turn 14 right-hander and just about got enough stopping power beneath his left foot for the car to avoid a shunt. That didn’t preclude him from contact as he clipped the barrier with his front wing, but seemed to escape relatively unscathed. His lead took a hit as he lost about four seconds, but it was healthy enough to absorb the damage.

Regardless, Verstappen pitted for hard tyres at the end of the lap, perhaps in the vain hope that he might be able to take a bit more out of Norris’s lead with the undercut. McLaren’s strategists responded a lap later, ensuring that any further impact on their driver’s lead was mitigated.

“I don't think [the front wing hit affected the car],” Norris explained later. “I mean, the team said that there was something with the front wing maybe being a little bit off. I hit the front wing against the barrier, so it might have tweaked it a touch. But I don't think probably enough to change it, but hard to know. On these cars, as soon as you tweak something a tiny bit, it can have quite a big impact, but nothing that I was probably feeling.”

All told post-stops, the margin between Norris and Verstappen was now down to ‘just’ 21s, with a long-stopping Oscar Piastri between. The Australian, who had never managed to capture the same ease as his McLaren team-mate across the Singapore weekend, was seeking to give himself enough of a tyre offset to challenge the Mercedes duo.

He’d spent the early laps stuck behind Russell, without ever really having the ammunition to mount a challenge for fourth in the opening stint.

On the hard tyres, Norris and Verstappen were incredibly evenly matched. There was slightly more ebb and flow to the McLaren driver’s lap times, while Verstappen’s were solidly in the high 1m36s to low 1m37s. Although Norris could set about restoring his lead and going beyond the high-water mark he’d set down before his front wing clip, it was not at the precipitous rate of his medium-tyre stint.

When Piastri finally stopped at the end of lap 38, Norris and Verstappen were drawn together again – on the leaderboard, rather than physically on track. The gap was once more blossoming in Norris’ favour, rising to 24s by the start of lap 45, but was the point at which the Bristol-born racer again survived a tangle with the wall.

It wasn't all plain sailing for Norris, who connected with the wall twice during his romp to victory

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

He took the customary line on the right-hand side of the track for Turn 10, the site of the once-infamous Singapore Sling chicane that packed an equivalent punch to the cocktail it was named after. Here, the barrier juts out slightly, and Norris touched it with the right-rear on turn-in to perhaps inject a further cause for concern. One or two millimetres closer, and it might have been game over – as per Russell’s crash last year.

That scarcely deterred Norris. Instead, it rather woke him up and set him back on course to keep opening the gap over Verstappen. It also prompted Joseph to issue a quick reminder to his charge: “Full concentration now, take a drink.” A sip of warm water was likely not a palatable one, but surely more so than any further wall-bothering antics.

“It was definitely not like I was cruising,” Norris recalled. “I was pushing to open up a gap, and at one point I wanted to try and open up a pit window to give myself an opportunity to maybe box at the end of the race for quickest lap, if I needed to try and achieve that.

"I was pushing to open up a gap, and at one point I wanted to try and open up a pit window to give myself an opportunity to maybe box at the end of the race for quickest lap" Lando Norris

“But the car was not easy to drive, especially on the hard tyres. I struggled a lot more than what I did on the medium. And especially just with the traffic and things, it was a bit harder to manage the second half of the stint compared to the first, but I was pushing.”

Instead, Norris took a couple of laps to charge up his battery and then let fly on the 48th tour to set a 1m34.925s in his concerted effort to get the extra fastest lap point. Spoiler alert: it didn’t stick, as the late-stopping pair of Kevin Magnussen and Daniel Ricciardo wrested the point away. The Dane had suffered a puncture at Turn 5 in a textbook demonstration of what happens when a driver clips the wall too hard, and bolted on the softs to set a 1m34.754s.

But Magnussen’s lap was deleted, and so the mantle passed to Ricciardo to punch in a 1m34.486s late on to erase Norris’ extra point (a parting gift for ex-team-mate Verstappen, perchance?) with a late blast on the softs.

Either way, Norris was only going to get one go at it; instead, McLaren was more concerned about the effect of dirty air from the traffic. The team needed Norris to focus on working his way through the plethora of backmarkers without taking excessive liberties. Joseph told Norris to simply “bring the car home” to end any discourse of opening up a pit window, later adding the difficulties Piastri had faced earlier when running behind the other cars.

After his near-misses, Norris was instructed against trying for the fastest lap bonus point

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

“In the second part of the second stint, our attention was drawn on the fact that as soon as you got behind the backmarkers, the car started to feel tricky,” Stella recounted. “So it was all about no issues, no mistakes, no lock-up. We had seen already in practice that as soon as you are behind a slow car; things look like there's something wrong with the car, but it's just the effect of the dirty air. So the focus was entirely on bringing the car home.

“We suggested to Lando to have an attempt at the fastest lap, which he achieved. But after that, we didn't want to talk about fastest lap anymore.”

Versus Verstappen, Norris lost 8s over the final 10 laps to traffic; by the end, everyone up to and including Fernando Alonso in eighth had been put a lap down. But it was time Norris could afford to spend given he’d saved up so much in advance, the sort of disposable margin that can be frittered away when one is so dominant.

Verstappen had little to say in the aftermath, although this was not through disappointment. He was indulging in a partially silent protest of FIA-organised press conferences following his community service sentence for swearing in Thursday’s session. Instead, he was moderately pleased with the result in isolation, given that Red Bull looked at sea in Friday practice. The team was perhaps fearing a repeat of last year’s race, where its 2023 dominance was ended with a dismal weekend in the South-East Asian city state.

“I think on a weekend where we knew that we were going to struggle, to be P2 is a good achievement,” he mused before the podium ceremony. “Of course, we're not happy with second, so now we just have to try and improve.”

Verstappen was feeling much more at ease with the car in Saturday’s practice session, as the lack of traction out of the slower corners appeared to be alleviated with an overnight simulator session. Simply put, it was all about getting the tyres into the right window, and Red Bull managed to find something that catapulted it above Ferrari and Mercedes during the Saturday sessions.

FP2 work on the hard tyre likely helped, as Red Bull focused its longer runs on the white-walled compound. McLaren, for its part, spent more time working with the medium compound – which could explain their relative strengths on the two different compounds.

While Verstappen rescued a second-place finish, warning signs of another winless weekend showed in practice for Red Bull

Photo by: Lionel Ng / Motorsport Images

“I think if you roll back the clock to Friday night, I think if you would have said we'd qualify on the front row and take second place a significant amount ahead of the rest of the field, I think we would have certainly taken that,” team boss Christian Horner said of Red Bull’s weekend. “But obviously the gap to Lando was significant in the first part of the race and we've now got the best part of a month to work hard and try and bring some performance to the car in Austin.”

Horner also noted the efforts of simulator driver Sebastien Buemi (a four-time Le Mans winner) in assisting with the turnaround back at Milton Keynes. “He was consuming plenty of Red Bull to keep him going! He played an important part, as does the whole team in working hard and long days and long nights. And with the benefit of there being no factory shutdown over the next three-week period, it's going to be a busy hive of activity.”

In his performance on the hard tyre, Verstappen at least ensured he had one McLaren beaten as Piastri was unable to scythe away at his arrears to the Dutchman. Once equipped with the hard tyre, Piastri made relatively light work of Lewis Hamilton – an early stopper who was starting to struggle with his own hard compound. It took a little longer to mount an assault on Russell, whose tyres were significantly younger than those of his team-mate, but Piastri got past with 17 laps to go.

"I think losing so much time behind the Mercedes in the first stint meant that that was definitely the most we could have done" Oscar Piastri

It was a tough ask for Piastri to close a near-20s deficit to Verstappen in that time. For a brief period, the Melburnian managed to shave 2s off the gap, but there was no magic second-and-a-half pace advantage that would accelerate his path to a higher step on the podium. Instead, the gap remained rather static as the two were tied for pace.

“I think losing so much time behind the Mercedes in the first stint meant that that was definitely the most we could have done,” Piastri reckoned. “I’m walking away reasonably happy. Of course, I'd prefer to be sat in the middle. But I think it was a good damage limitation day today.

“I knew that the race was going to come to me much later on, and that's basically what we did. When I was in the dirty air behind them, it was tough, as it always is, but I knew that we had a good pace advantage and that the longer we kept going the more opportunities we opened up for ourselves the bigger tyre difference we had.”

With six races remaining – a quarter of a season – left in this gruelling 24-race calendar, Norris has to continue to eat away at Verstappen’s 52-point advantage at the top of the tree. But he needs Piastri to be in the pocket between him and Verstappen, rather than falling prey to the whims of his fluctuating consistency.

Piastri's chances of victory dropped with his qualifying struggle, though he fought through to third

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

And, of course, Norris needs to tap into his Singapore performance and repeat it across the next six rounds. There’s certainly marked change in his demeanour. The relief of achieving a first win in Miami has long since subsided, and Norris now seems reticent to celebrate the subsequent wins too much.

“The focus I see in the team now is this: the team looks like we are on a mission, if that makes sense,” Stella concluded. “It almost looks like each of these wins is like it's just a stage, even though when you win you have to celebrate, because it doesn't happen all the time.”

But there’s four weeks between the Singapore and US GP, without shutdowns present in the identical gap between races across the summer. Red Bull, for its part, is planning a series of upgrades for Austin that it hopes will see Verstappen to a fourth title at Norris’s expense.

McLaren also has some updates in the pipeline, although it seems to be continuing to perform without bringing too much to the track. “We need to trust the process,” is Stella’s mantra: and it won't be long before the final results of ‘the process’ come to fruition.

A pole and win for Norris as McLaren's charge continues - will the trust in the process yield further success?

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images