In his seventh season with McLaren, Lando Norris has everything in his arsenal to be a Formula 1 champion, according to his race engineer, Will Joseph.
Through 131 Grand Prix weekends, Joseph has been the voice in Norris’ ear since they were paired up at a test before the 2019 season.
“Every driver is on a constant curve of improvement,” Joseph said in an interview in March. “We’re very high up that development curve.”
“There are always areas for improvement, but he’s demonstrated he has the ability to be a world champion. It’s all about putting it together. Everything has to align in order for that to happen.”
After finishing second to Max Verstappen of Red Bull in last year’s championship, Norris has started this season strongly. He won the first Grand Prix, in Australia, was runner-up a week later in China to Oscar Piastri, his teammate, and was second in last Sunday’s race in Japan. Four races into the season, he is leading the drivers’ ranking, one point ahead of Verstappen.
His relationship with Joseph is vital for his championship bid. Joseph is, in essence, the conductor of the Norris orchestra, trying to get each engineer underneath him to do their utmost for Norris and the car.
As a race engineer, he is “responsible for the car setup, the run plans, the tire usage, for all communications with the driver and all the administration that goes around a driver, factory days, time at the track, etc.” He is Norris’ right-hand man.
Joseph, who has a degree in aerothermal and aerospace engineering, said one of his biggest roles “is to be emotionally attached to the driver.” It is “something we’re not necessarily good at or trained at,” he said. “It’s the hardest bit.”
“Every driver wants to be and needs to be treated very differently,” he said. “How you interact with one driver is very different from another. That is the biggest thing about different drivers.
“Clearly, drivers will have different preferences in how they set the car up, how they want the balance. Learning how to get the most from each driver is where we can add a lot of benefit.”
Joseph worked with Fernando Alonso, a two-time Formula 1 champion, first as a performance engineer and then in 2018 as a race engineer before Norris joined the next season. It was beneficial.
“Fernando was already a world champion, a fantastic driver,” Joseph said. “For me, it was very good that, as a newbie race engineer, I had someone of such high experience that I 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 lead.”
Joseph’s relationship with Norris has evolved. “From Lando as a rookie to Lando now, it’s a very different interaction,” Joseph said. “There are some core fundamentals that have stayed the same, but we’ve had to develop and evolve through that period.”
Norris said working with Joseph from the beginning, and the stability of the team around him, had been “very important” to his development.
“It’s something that I want and need and something I’ll always try to make sure I have into the future,” he said.
The trust between them has grown so that they “know each other on a very personal level,” Norris said. “It is very important to have that relationship because it’s an honest one.
“It always takes time to get to that level where you can really trust one another, to know how each other thinks. You can push one another, even in uncomfortable situations.”
They are not best friends, Joseph said. Neither are they “an old married couple,” a term used by Christian Horner, the Red Bull team principal, to describe the relationship between Verstappen and his race engineer, Gianpiero Lambiase.
“We’re not quite that far yet,” Joseph said. “Our relationship is subtly different. I would certainly say we are friends, and we have a very strong relationship.
“But am I texting him midweek about certain stuff? No. The job of the race engineer is to have that adult relationship with a colleague because, at the end of the day, Lando is a friend, but he’s also a colleague, and if there are things that need to be done, I can be frank about it and vice versa.”
Unlike Verstappen and Lambiase, who have bickered over the radio during Grands Prix, Joseph keeps interactions with Norris calm.
“We try and keep things private,” Joseph said. “I can often say something he will not be happy with, but we don’t need to publicly have that conversation.
“There was a good example where he said something on the radio, and I said, ‘God, that sounded pretty bad,’ but we don’t worry about how things come across on the radio because we know the trust is there, and we can have a conversation afterwards.”
Joseph said the proliferation of radio messages aired during a Grand Prix meant he had to filter himself before speaking with Norris.
“In the modern world, where everything that’s said on the radio is broadcast, which wasn’t the case even a few years ago, you have to be slightly more aware,” he said.
Andrea Stella, the McLaren team principal, said Joseph had been “a very powerful guide for Lando,” creating a relationship “that is very genuine.”
“It’s a relationship, and this is something I like, in which they don’t hesitate to challenge each other,” Stella said in an interview in March.
“For Lando, it was important to have a race engineer who doesn’t always say, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ I liked the fact Lando said: ‘Don’t always tell me I’m right. I don’t need this.’”
Stella said Joseph had become “one of the most impressive race engineers I’ve seen.” Before his current position, Joseph was a performance engineer, who focused on maximizing the performance of a car based on data gathered over a race weekend.
“He has a large familiarity with live data, so he can understand and read performance rapidly,” Stella said.
“Race engineers also need to possess some leadership qualities because they need to bring groups together, deal with drivers, motivate them, keep them calm when the pressure rises, saying the right word at the right time. From this point of view, Will has the right sensitivity, the right values.”
An added skill is that Joseph has been a helicopter pilot since 2017. “I now just fly for fun,” he said. “I try and fly different aircraft to learn.”
Stella said it played a part in Joseph’s competence as a race engineer: “In terms of communications and procedures, he adds a lot of values.”
As “a source of inspiration,” according to Stella, Joseph played an integral role in McLaren winning the constructors’ title last year for the first time in 26 years.
After missing out on becoming the drivers’ champion, Norris has an opportunity to go one step further this year.
Joseph said that, naturally, there had been “a huge change” in Norris from the driver who first joined the team to now.
“When he joined, he was a rookie, so we came up with a development plan of what we thought we needed to cover to ultimately achieve our goal and his goals,” Joseph said. “That has changed yearly.
“Over time he has become more aware and more capable than we are because he’s so in tune with the car. He has that understanding. Whereas before we had to be more demanding on him, he can now be more demanding on us.”
