Lando Norris ‘demons’ banished with career milestone in Singapore GP victory
Will Joseph has been Lando Norris’ race engineer for the driver’s entire time in F1.
Lando Norris’ race engineer believes the driver has banished his “demons” after a strong start to the Singapore Grand Prix.
The McLaren driver has on multiple occasions this season failed to get away from the line meaning heading into Singapore, he had won just one race in which he started on pole. That figure has now doubled and Will Joseph believes the matter is behind them.
Lando Norris backed to move on from poor starts
Norris got away well in Singapore and never really looked back as he went on to finish over 20 seconds ahead of P2 Max Verstappen and put in the most dominant performance of his career.
As for the start in particular, race engineer Joseph believes the matter of poor getaways was now put to bed.
“In the factory, we’d reviewed race starts and you kind of go in there going to find something special,” he told the F1 Nation podcast. “But you come out thinking ‘well, actually, it’s not as bad as everyone is trying to make it out to be’.
“And it’s just some things aren’t necessary to talk about. We just do our job.
“I think we saw signs of that [progress] after the Netherlands, too. That was such a good race as well. I think the nice thing about this weekend is it just being so strong at an event where we didn’t necessarily expect to be the quickest and we’ve put some demons to bed.
“People can no longer say, ‘well, we can’t get out of the first corner, we can’t finish the first lap.’ We’ve led from start to finish, and didn’t really put a foot wrong.”
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The Singapore victory was the biggest winning margin since Norris’s success in Zandvoort and Joseph praised how comfortable the driver was from the word go.
“I think he did a fantastic job. I think from lap one this weekend, we’ve been on the pace, and Lando has demonstrated how quick he could be,” he said.
“He’s been very comfortable in the car from the word go and I think we’ve just built on that. We tried to make small steps in the car to make it quicker. We’ve made sure that we’ve finished the race in a good position.
“I think he’s been incredible. We kind of said there were two ways it might go, and at the beginning, it became clear that we could sort of push on and just build the gap. I don’t think any one of us expected the gap to be quite so large. We cleared the safety car window then we cleared the full pit stop window. The pace was phenomenal.”
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