In his seventh season with McLaren, Lando Norris has everything in his arsenal to be Formula 1 champion, according to his engineer Will Joseph.
Through 131 weekends of the Grand Prix, Joseph was the voice in Norris’ ear, combined in a test before the 2019 season.
“Every driver is in a steady improvement curve,” Joseph said in an interview in March. “We are too high this growth curve.”
“There are always areas for improvement, but it has proven to be able to be a world champion.
After completing the second at Red Bull’s Max Verstappen in last year’s league, Norris started strongly this season. He won the first Grand Prix, in Australia, was run -up a week later in China at Oscar Piasstri, his teammate, and was second in last Sunday’s match in Japan. Four races in the season, leading to drivers’ ranking, one point in front of Verstappen.
His relationship with Joseph is vital to the league’s offer. Joseph is, in essence, the conductor of the Norris orchestra, trying to get every engineer under him to do what is possible for Norris and the car.
As a race engineer, he is “responsible for the car regulation, the execution plans, the use of tires, for all communications with the driver and all the administration that passes around a driver, factory days, time on the track, etc.” He is the right man of Norris.
Joseph, who has a degree in aerospace and aerospace engineering, said one of his biggest roles “must be emotionally connected to the driver”. It is “something we are not necessarily good or trained in”, he said. “It’s the hardest part.”
“Every driver wants to be and must be treated very differently,” he said. “How do you interact with one guide is very different from the other. This is the biggest thing for different drivers.
“Clearly, drivers will have different preferences on how they put the car up. How they want the balance.
Joseph worked with Fernando Alonso, a Formula 1 champion, first as a performance engineer, and then in 2018 as a race engineer before Norris joined the following season. They were beneficial.
“Fernando was already a world champion, a fantastic guide,” Joseph said. “For me, it was very good that, as a Newbie -mechanical race, I had one of such a high experience that I could benefit more than him than vice versa.
“Then I could get this learning and understanding to Lando, who was a recruiter and needed things very different. I was the lead.”
Joseph’s relationship with Norris has evolved. “From Lando as a recruitment to Lando now, it’s a very different interaction,” Joseph said. “There are some basic basic elements that have remained the same, but we had to develop and evolve through this period.”
Norris said that working with Joseph from the beginning and the stability of the team around him was “very important” in his development.
“It’s something I want and I need and something I will always try to make sure I have in the future,” he said.
Trust between them has increased so that they “know each other very personal,” Norris said. “It is very important to have this relationship because it is honest.
“It always takes time to get to this level where you can really trust each other, to find out how they think of each other.
They are no better friends, Joseph said. Nor is it “an old married couple”, a term used by Christian Horner, the leader of the Red Bull team, to describe the relationship between Verstappen and his engineer Gianpiero Lambiase.
“We’re not so far away,” Joseph said. “Our relationship is different. I would definitely say we are friends and we have a very strong relationship.
“But I send him messages in the middle of the week for some things? No. The job of the race engineer is to have this adult relationship with a colleague, because at the end of the day, Lando is a friend, but he is also a colleague and if there are things to be done, I can be honest.”
Unlike Verstappen and Lambiase, who have passed through the radio during the Grands Prix, Joseph maintains Norris Calm interactions.
“We’re trying to keep things private,” Joseph said. “I can often say something that will not be happy, but we do not need to have this discussion publicly.
“There was a good example where he said something on the radio and I said,” God, which sounds very bad “, but we don’t worry about how things meet on the radio because we know that trust is there and we can discuss later.”
Joseph said that the proliferation of radio messages shown during a Grand Prix meant that he had to filter himself before talking to Norris.
“In the modern world, where everything they say on the radio is broadcast, which was not the case a few years ago, you must be slightly more aware,” he said.
Andrea Stella, the director of the McLaren team, said Joseph was “a very powerful driver for Lando”, creating a “very genuine” relationship.
“It’s a relationship, and that’s something I like, in which they don’t hesitate to question each other,” Stella said in an interview in March.
“For Lando, it was important to have a mechanical race that doesn’t always say,” Yes, you are right. “I liked the fact that Lando said,” Don’t always tell me I’m right.
Stella said that Joseph had become “one of the most impressive engineers I have seen”. Prior to his current position, Joseph was a performance engineer, who focused on maximizing the performance of a car based on the data gathered in a weekend race.
“He is very familiar with live data so he can understand and read performance quickly,” Stella said.
“Racing engineers must also have some leadership properties because they have to bring the teams together, deal with drivers, motivate them, keep them calm when the pressure increases, saying the right word at the right time. In this respect, Will has the right sensitivity.”
An additional skill is that Joseph was a helicopter pilot since 2017. “Now I fly for fun,” he said. “I try to fly different aircraft to find out.”
Stella said she played a role in Joseph’s ability as a mechanical struggle: “In terms of communications and processes, she adds many values.”
As a “source of inspiration”, according to Stella, Joseph played an integral role in McLaren by winning the title of manufacturers last year in 26 years.
After he has lost the driver champion, Norris has the opportunity to go a step further this year.
Joseph said, of course, there was a “huge change” in Norris by the driver who joined the team for the first time so far.
“When he joined, he was a recruiter, so we came with a development plan for what we thought we had to cover in order to finally achieve our goal and his goals,” Joseph said. “This has changed each year.
“Over time it has become more sensitized and more capable than we are because they are coordinated by the car. He has this understanding, and before we had to be more demanding for him, he can now be more demanding for us.”
