Why Norris doesn’t buy Russell’s driving style theory

The racing drivers’ manual of excuses is an immense and well-thumbed volume. This year the peculiarities of the new technical formula appear to have spawned a new entry.

Across the grid, apparently inexplicable differences have appeared between team-mates, complicated to decode even with extensive analysis of the data. A working theory has emerged that differences in peak speeds are a factor of tiny variations in driving style which leaves one driver with slightly less electrical charge than their team-mate at a given point of the circuit, prompting the governing algorithms in the software to turn down the wick.

But as a counterpoint to this there are those who, like Max Verstappen, believe the machinations of energy management have made the driver less of a differentiating factor. For him the ‘smoking gun’ is Liam Lawson, a driver he annihilated in the same car in the ground-effect era, jumping in the 2026 Red Bull and being almost as quick as him.

Max also pointed at Yuki Tsunoda jumping in the Racing Bulls at Zandvoort and being competitive straight away, with zero prior experience of the 2026 cars. But then Yuki negated the point, after a fashion, by making a mess of things at Monza, forgetting to activate Straightline Mode at various points during practice and qualifying.

And yet there are enough peculiarities to suggest there is substance to the theory when comparing Russell to his Mercedes team-mate Kimi Antonelli in the world championship battle, along with the McLaren duo of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri. Mercedes and McLaren bigwigs have lent their weight to the theory, although cynics could of course cite the Mandy Rice-Davies principle: “Well they would say that, wouldn’t they?”

In Spain, in between fielding questions about the track designers’ inability to understand how to conjure a layout conducive to overtaking, Russell returned to the theme of trying to understand where and why Antonelli has been faster than him.

“I do have an answer and I'm working on it,” he said. “And I think it's been much improved. So I'm very pleased with the step I've taken because fundamentally changing the driving style, I think, is achievable for a lot of drivers. But then actually being fast with it is another topic.

Russell has a theory of why he is being outperformed by Antonelli - and there being a similar story elsewhere on the grid

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“And I feel my performance since the summer break has been… I've qualified ahead of him in the three qualifying sessions. And my race pace has been on a par with him in these two races. And I couldn't say that pre-break. So, as I said, I'm definitely very pleased with that progression. We'll have to see where the rest of the season takes us.”

The issue of disparities in electrical deployment between team-mates is at its most pronounced at tracks with long straights, since the driver with the lower state of charge either receives a lower quantity of electrical boost down the straight, equating to a lower peak speed, or enters the so-called ramp-down phase (colloquially referred to as ‘the staircase’) earlier. Achieving the ‘optimal lap’ targeted by the engineers requires a counter-intuitive dance with the controls: it isn’t necessarily just a case of sliding less here or there, the driver also has to hit their marks in terms of throttle position.

All this rehearsal has to be done in the simulator because the days of unlimited track testing are long in the past.

"My driving style is good because I'm able to adapt better. I don't think it's one style that works" Lando Norris

“It’s like, in a game of football, if you're struggling with something, they tell you that you can't go to the training pitch until the day before the match… and you've got two one-hour sessions to try and totally change something and improve upon it,” said Russell.

“So it has been difficult. Using the practice sessions as an opportunity to trial things and even in the races themselves having to try things in the races, working on those techniques. That is just the challenge of Formula 1. And it has been a strange season when you look at the competitiveness of Piastri against Lando last year, Charles [Leclerc] versus Lewis [Hamilton] – and even the dominance of Max against all of his team-mates in the previous era. This year, myself, Charles, Oscar are struggling much more compared to our team-mates.

“And Max – his team-mates have been substantially closer to him than anybody has in the past six years. Kimi, Lewis, Lando have also got quite similar driving styles. So, to me, it's pretty clear with this car, with these tyres, what I need to achieve. And the trends are there with those four drivers who I just mentioned.”

Limited testing opportunities have left Russell with fewer chances to adapt to the new F1 cars

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Norris has poo-pooed that theory earlier this season and he was happy to do so again.

“Honestly I wouldn't really say my driving style suits this car,” he said. “I think my driving style is good because I'm able to adapt better. I don't think it's one style that works. I don't think I drive the same way as Kimi. I've obviously never had him as a team-mate or Lewis, so I have no idea. He [Hamilton] can probably paint a better picture. He's also not been my team-mate, so I don't think he can speak from knowledge of that. But my driving style doesn't suit this car.

“My adaptability is what allows me to drive the car I've got. I think my strength is my adaptability to different driving styles. It wasn't necessarily the best thing that I had for me last year. I think last year the beginning suited Oscar a little bit more. My strength was being able to adapt better to then finally understand how to drive it in a better way. Hence then I started to have a better second half of the season.

“And the same thing with this year. You don't drive this car anywhere close to last year. Not even 1% I feel is remotely the same. So I think it's incorrect to say my driving style just suits it. My ability to adapt better I think is what's my strength.”

Although he is teetering on the brink of contradicting himself here, Norris makes a very good point about adaptability. The 2026 cars do require very counter-intuitive approach, from the absurd restrictions surrounding throttle position to the way they often penalise going around corners faster. It was a wall many drivers banged their heads against earlier in the season before realising that the most productive outcome lay in working with the cars’ limitations rather than complaining about them.

Russell enjoyed a cushion at the beginning of the season based on having more frontline F1 experience than Antonelli, and a much faster car than anyone else. But as car performance has converged and Antonelli has thrown himself into mastering the cars, Russell has had to work harder.

After the Italian Grand Prix, where Antonelli humbled Russell from 19th on the grid – albeit with some help from a usefully timed virtual safety car deployment, a feature that repeated to aid Antonelli's win in Sunday's Spanish GP – team boss Toto Wolff likened Kimi to an AI agent, constantly learning. There is a way to drive these cars quickly: it’s ugly, but you just have to learn how.

Has Antonelli just adapted or learned quicker than Russell?

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For his part, Norris does have a different style to Russell – he takes a shallower approach to the apex, overlaps throttle and brake more, and uses the point where the lateral grip of the front tyres peaks to help rotate the car. If he doesn’t trust the rear end of the car to behave, and the front end isn’t communicative enough about the state of the grip, Norris is nowhere – as in Bahrain last season, for instance. But if he has those prerequisites underneath him, he can adapt his cornering trajectory and brake-throttle overlap to suit.

What changed the game for Norris back then was McLaren’s development of an alternative front suspension geometry that traded some theoretical performance for greater ‘feel’. In combination with his ability to adapt, this more than compensated for the aerodynamic cost of the alternative front end giving less anti-dive.

It’s also true that there are commonalities between Russell’s and Piastri’s styles. They have a greater separation of braking and steering, less overlap of brake and throttle; fundamentally they are ordering the car to do their bidding rather than working with it. Several drivers, including those whose job it is to spend hours in the sim refining the models, reckon that approach is tougher to adapt to the peculiarities of the 2026 cars.

"The drivers who can also look at that very objectively and have the openness, and also to be able to say, ‘OK, this was my error, this actually wasn't the car, this is something that I did, what can I do next time so that this isn't happening,’ that is the right mindset" Elina Haukipuro

So citing driving style may not be the excuse many believe it to be. It’s also a key marker of psychology, and very indicative of the different states of mind up and down the grid.

Elite performance coach and former Mercedes team doctor Elina Haukipuro talks about the need for drivers to avoid a “negative spiral” as they mentally process defeats. Often the easiest way is to blame the car, but they can also begin to question their own abilities – as Russell did around his mid-season slump this season, and Norris did in the early rounds of 2025.

“Having that negative thought that just carries with you from one race to the next is really, really bad for the concentration, for the focus, for the performance,” Haukipuro told Autosport.

Perfecting the mental side of F1 is also just as important as the best driving style

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“Because the drivers that do perform the best in cases like this, especially when they've had a difficult race or a couple of races, are the ones who are able to let go of that and focus on the current situation, focusing on the race itself, and focusing on that race specifically, and not carrying the weight of the whole season on their shoulders. As soon as we're starting to think of, OK, where am I in the points, who's in front of me, what is going to happen if I perform like this, you're already putting way too much attention on other things than the race itself.

“You have to be able to kind of distinguish or detach the results from your entire identity, let alone self-worth, because even if your entire world or majority of it is revolving around racing, that can't be everything that you stand for. So having the ability to see that, to have the trust in your skills, being able to, in a more neutral way, analyse something that has happened, or even accepting it.

“‘This is what has happened, I made a mistake, what are we learning from it, why is it happening.’ We go through a lot of understanding of why something happens – I always say that everything comes out of something, there's always an explanation for why you react a certain way, why something has happened during a race.

“Especially in F1, we have so much data. The drivers who can also look at that very objectively and have the openness, and also to be able to say, ‘OK, this was my error, this actually wasn't the car, this is something that I did, what can I do next time so that this isn't happening,’ and not push the blame on something else, that is the right mindset.”

If the current F1 season has taught us anything, then, it’s that the drivers who adapt best will thrive.

Is Antonelli simply nailing adaptability and mental requirements for F1 2026?

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