What McLaren team boss Andrea Stella thinks about Formula One driver Lando Norris’ harsh self-criticism and what consequences he draws from it
“I fucked up and it hurts.” That’s how McLaren driver Lando Norris described his emotions after qualifying at the 2023 Qatar Grand Prix. And those are still the most innocuous comments Norris has made in summation. Because he has not been sparing with harsh self-criticism recently, his team boss Andrea Stella is now speaking out. He thinks: “Norris is perhaps overdoing it a bit.
Self-criticism is all well and good, says Stella, “but everyone has to find the right balance here”. There needs to be the “right dynamic” in communicating externally, but also “internally with yourself”, he explains. “That’s the only way you can perform and improve every day.”
“That’s why I think: as hard as Lando is with himself, like after qualifying on Friday [in Qatar], for example, we need to put that to the test,” Stella says. “In doing so, we need to be completely honest.”
Norris, for example, needs to ask himself whether he really needs to be “so hard” on himself, he says. “He needs to ask himself: what is the real goal? To be faster in every corner, in every lap, in every session? Or just to perform to the best of his ability, regardless of anything else?”
“I guess all of us – Lando, Oscar and every single person in the team – we all have some development to do here,” says McLaren team boss Stella, though without naming specifically what that development might look like in individual cases.
Only this much: Norris has to manage the balancing act of practising self-criticism within a tolerable framework, but without chastising himself too much.
“Lando is such an honest skin,” Stella says. “I think he brings that honesty to every kind of relationship, including the one with himself.”
“My impression is: he wants to use it to make sure he’s honest with himself when things go wrong. He doesn’t want to sound arrogant with it. But he also doesn’t want to look like he doesn’t accept that things could have been better. “
