In his seventh season with McLaren, Lando Norris has everything in his arsenal to be a formula 1 champion, according to his racing engineer, Will Joseph.
For 131 weekends of the Grand Prize, Joseph has been the voice in Norris’s ear since they were paired in a test before the 2019 season.
“Each driver is in a constant improvement curve,” Joseph said in an interview in March. “We are very high in that development curve.”
“There are always areas of improvement, but it has shown that it has the ability to be a world champion. It’s about assembling it. Everything has to align to happen.”
After ending Max Verstappen from Red Bull in last year’s championship, Norris has started this season with force. He won the first Grand Prix, in Australia, he was runner -up a week later in China to Oscar Piasstri, his teammate, and was second in last Sunday’s race in Japan. Four races in the season, is leading the pilots’ ranking, a point ahead of Verstappen.
His relationship with Joseph is vital for his championship offer. Joseph is, in essence, the director of the Norris orchestra, trying to make each engineer under it do everything possible by Norris and the car.
As a racing engineer, he is “responsible for the configuration of the car, the career plans, the use of tires, for all communications with the driver and the entire administration that surrounds a driver, days of the factory, time on the track, etc.” He is the man by Norris’s right.
Joseph, who has a degree in aerothermal and aerospace engineering, said that one of his greatest roles “must be emotionally attached to the driver.” It is “something that we are not necessarily good or trained,” he said. “It is the most difficult part.”
“Each driver wants to be and needs to be treated very differently,” he said. “The way you interact with a driver is very different from another. That is the most important thing about the different drivers.
“Clearly, drivers will have different preferences in how they configure the car, how they want balance. Learning to make the most of each driver is where we can add many benefits.”
Joseph worked with Fernando Alonso, twice Formula 1 champion, first as a performance engineer and then in 2018 as a racing engineer before Norris joined the next season. It was beneficial.
“Fernando was already a world champion, a fantastic pilot,” Joseph said. “For me, it was very good that, as a rookie racing engineer, he had someone of such a high experience that he could benefit more from him than the other way around.
“Then I could take that learning and understanding to Lando, who was a rookie and needed things very differently. There, I was the leader.”
Joseph’s relationship with Norris has evolved. “From Lando as a rookie to Lando now, it is a very different interaction,” Joseph said. “There are some central foundations that have remained the same, but we have had to develop and evolve during that period.”
Norris said that working with Joseph from the beginning, and the stability of the surrounding team, had been “very important” for its development.
“It’s something I want and need, and something I will always try to make sure I have in the future,” he said.
The trust between them has grown so that “they know each other at a very personal level,” Norris said. “It is very important to have that relationship because it is honest.
“It always takes time to reach that level on which they can really trust each other, to know how they think of each other. It can be pushed each other, even in uncomfortable situations.”
They are not better friends, Joseph said. Nor are they “an old married couple”, a term used by Christian Horner, the director of the Red Bull team, to describe the relationship between Verstappen and his racing engineer, Gianpiero Lambiase.
“We are not so far,” Joseph said. “Our relationship is subtly different. I would certainly say we are friends and have a very strong relationship.
“But am I sending text messages mid -week about certain things?
Unlike Verstappen and Lambiase, who have been arranged on the radio during the prize of greats, Joseph keeps interactions with Norris Calm.
“We try to keep private things,” Joseph said. “I can often say something that I will not be happy, but we do not need to have that conversation publicly.
“There was a good example in which he said something on the radio, and I said: ‘God, that sounded quite bad’, but we did not care about how things are on the radio because we know that trust is there, and we can have a conversation later.”
Joseph said that the proliferation of radio messages transmitted during a Grand Prix meant that he had to leak before speaking with Norris.
“In the modern world, where everything that is said on the radio is transmitted, which was not the case a few years ago, you must be a bit more conscious,” he said.
Andrea Stella, director of the McLaren team, said that Joseph had been “a very powerful guide for Lando”, creating a relationship “that is very genuine.”
“It is a relationship, and this is something that I like, in which they do not hesitate to challenge itself,” Stella said in an interview in March.
“For Lando, it was important to have a career engineer who does not always say: ‘Yes, you are right.’ I liked the fact that Lando said:” Don’t always tell me that I am right.
Stella said Joseph had become “one of the most impressive career engineers I have seen.” Before his current position, Joseph was a performance engineer, who focused on maximizing the performance of a data based on data collected during a race weekend.
“It has a great familiarity with live data, so you can understand and read performance quickly,” Stella said.
“The engineers of the breed must also have some leadership qualities because they need to unite groups, deal with drivers, motivate them, keep them calm when the pressure increases, saying the right word at the right time. From this point of view, it will have the correct sensitivity, the correct values.”
An additional ability is that Joseph has been a helicopter pilot since 2017. “Now just flight for fun,” he said. “I try to fly different planes to learn.”
Stella said he played a role in Joseph’s competition as a racing engineer: “In terms of communications and procedures, he adds many values.”
As “a source of inspiration,” according to Stella, Joseph played an integral role in McLaren winning the title of the builders last year for the first time in 26 years.
After becoming becoming the pilot champion, Norris has the opportunity to go one step further this year.
Joseph said that, naturally, there had been “a great change” in Norris of the driver who first joined the team so far.
“When he joined, he was a rookie, so we came up with a development plan for what we thought we needed to cover to achieve our goal and its goals,” Joseph said. “That has changed annually.
“Over time he has become more aware and more capable of who we are because he is so in tune with the car. He has that understanding. While before having to be more demanding for him, he can now be more demanding for us.”
