Headline: Button says Norris’s fiercest rival is the guy in his own helmet — and that’s his edge
Lando Norris is 24 points clear with three rounds on the board and, for the first time in his F1 career, he looks entirely comfortable with the weight of a title chase. He’s still the same driver who’ll tell you when he’s botched a quali lap or left time on the table. The difference this year? He’s turned that habit into a weapon.
Jenson Button, who knows a thing or two about managing a tightrope season, reckons Norris’s ability to be brutally honest with himself — and not spiral because of it — has been a “superpower.”
“I’ve said before, when a driver is always negative about himself it can be used against him,” Button told Sky’s The F1 Show. “It’s not a weakness pointing the finger at yourself, it’s a strength, but you don’t want to let everyone else see that. For him to understand an incident was his fault and not point the finger elsewhere in the team — that’s very grown up. If you can control that mentally, it’s impressive.”
The numbers back up the mood. Norris has flipped a 34-point deficit to his McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri into that 24-point lead. And there’s a very real pressure point coming: outscore Max Verstappen by nine this weekend and the Red Bull man is mathematically out of the title fight, leaving McLaren’s young guns to settle it between themselves.
That alone says plenty about Norris’s evolution. Early in his career he’d air frustrations over the radio and dissect his own errors publicly, which raised eyebrows. You don’t often see the title-hardened crowd broadcast their insecurities. But this version of Norris doesn’t sound insecure. He sounds clinical. He’s learned to treat mistakes like data: log them, learn, move on. It disarms rivals looking for weakness and reassures a team that he’s not reaching for scapegoats.
Button sees exactly that. “Maybe he’s just very good at talking about his weaknesses and how he can improve himself,” he said. “It really is impressive to see.”
The result has been a run of drives that feel like the work of a driver who knows he’s ready. Norris’s pace is the obvious headliner, but it’s his management of messy weekends that has shifted the title needle. Those were the days that used to sting McLaren. Now they’re the days he banks big points on a B-grade performance.
It helps that McLaren have afforded their pair a remarkably even platform. Piastri, cool as ice and relentlessly tidy, has pushed Norris into finding new gears — and occasionally the edge of the cliff. That internal push-and-pull has defined McLaren’s season. The difference lately is that Norris has found the knack of turning small margins into big swings. Start fourth, finish second. Miss pole, control the race anyway. Championships are built on that kind of monotony.
Button isn’t sugar-coating the scenario either: “You’d have to say at the moment, it’s in Lando’s favour. First of all, he’s leading the championship. But secondly, the performances are there.”
That’s the tell. Drivers don’t just win titles because they happen to be ahead with three to go. They win them because they look like they belong there. Norris finally does. There’s still a balance to strike — every champion has a voice in their head that won’t shut up about the tenth you left at Turn 9 — but controlling that voice is half the game. Button’s point is that Norris isn’t silencing it; he’s harnessing it.
What comes next is the cold arithmetic of late-season Formula 1. If Verstappen is elbowed out of the math, the title becomes a clean McLaren shootout — an extraordinary sentence in itself. Piastri won’t go quietly, because he never does, and he’s been ruthless enough this season to punish the slightest wobble. Norris knows that better than anyone.
So the brief is simple, and brutal: keep stacking results; keep the inner critic on a leash; don’t let the picture get bigger than the next lap. Do that, and the driver who used to scold himself on Saturdays might just be the one lifting the trophy on Sunday night.
For now, it’s Norris’s championship to lose. And that, as Button notes, is exactly when the superpowers matter.
