But it’s also true that this year’s Pirelli construction has been designed to be much more grain-resistant. Will it be so even around the extreme demands of this place? Then there’s another point to consider: although Norris finished behind both Mercs, both Ferraris and Verstappen last year, he was actually very fast in his final stint. Because he and the team tried something extreme to limit the effects of the graining fronts. “I want to reveal the least amount possible,” said Norris yesterday in reference to what he found in that last stint a year ago, “but I think we were so bad that you just get to a point where you try a lot… So I was just experimenting with a lot – experimenting with my driving, with driving styles, approaches to the car, which is not always easy, trying to figure out how the car likes to get driven because it changes every weekend, and with the toys and things like that.”
In the aftermath of that race McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said, “The review of Lando’s third stint will give us important information as to what you need to achieve in a track like this with our car. Because the way we ended up running the car and driving the car is way outside what normally we would do.
“The front limitation of the car is long-standing, a McLaren characteristic we have improved over time but which is still there… That characteristic can jump out when the track layout, the downforce level and the grip level combine to demand a certain response from the front end which at the moment we are not able to provide our drivers. So we approached things in a more aggressive way in the third stint, really forced away the limitation of the front.”
These are hard points of competitiveness, potentially far more powerful than any imagined psychological competitive pressure. They are hard physics and they dominate the competitive order.
It could be that, just as Stella suggested last year, they learned enough from that tough race to alter those variables in a way which could allow Norris to win his third race on the bounce. But if he does, it’s less likely to be some elevated level he has reached than some solid engineering understanding. On the other hand, if he struggles as much as he did here a year ago, it won’t be because the pressure has got to him and he does not have the mentality of a champion. They are just simplistic stories which feed the sport’s popularity. But little to do with hard reality.