McLaren’s title fight is razor-tight, but Zak Brown is more interested in what people aren’t saying: Lando Norris’ mindset has caught up with his speed.
Norris heads into the summer break second in the standings, nine points behind teammate Oscar Piastri after 14 rounds, with five wins on the board. He opened 2025 by converting pole into victory in Australia, then reeled off three wins from the last four starts and missed a Belgian triumph by a whisker to the sister car. The form is obvious. The shift behind it is what Brown wants to underline.
“I think Lando’s in a great place,” the McLaren CEO told Racer. “There was also a time Lando couldn’t win from pole, according to the world, and he’s won four of the last five races [he’s started] from pole. So I think this kind of narrative around Lando is not accurate today.”
Twelve months ago, Norris was Verstappen’s most persistent shadow but got edged out in the wheel-to-wheel moments that decide titles. That, coupled with Piastri’s ice-cool execution, bred a lazy conclusion: Norris wasn’t tough enough yet when the room got hot. It didn’t help that he’d often lean into self-deprecation when things weren’t perfect.
This season, the tone’s different. Canada served up the sort of flashpoint that could have lingered — Norris tagged the back of Piastri’s car and took himself out, surrendering a meaty points haul. He owned it immediately, parked it by Austria, and went back to stacking results. The driving is sharper, but the bounce-back is what’s changed.
“He’s open, kind of wears his emotions on his sleeve,” Brown said. “I’ve never seen him in a better place. I think the Lando of a year ago maybe would have been more critical on himself… Much like the ‘he can’t win from pole’ stat — now that he’s won four or five races from pole, no one seems to be talking about that.”
Norris hasn’t pretended the internal battle is solved. Early in the year — after a Bahrain weekend that Piastri bossed — he spoke about forcing the balance, training himself to hold onto the positives as tightly as the negatives. “I know I’m tough on myself, and for 95 percent of it, it’s a good thing,” he said. “I accept there’s probably the last few percent… where I probably say too many negatives and that gets into my own head… That’s the main area I need to improve.”
The scoreboard says this title is in-house at McLaren. The subtext, as Brown points out, is that Norris has done the quiet work to make sure the old labels don’t apply anymore. Now it’s about who blinks first.
