Lando Norris: McLaren car suits Daniel Ricciardo - not me!

Ricciardo will exit the team at the end of this season and is fighting to retain a spot in the 2023 F1 driver line-up, after being replaced by Oscar Piastri.

Norris has constantly outperformed Ricciardo this season but insists he has done so in machinery that is unfavourable.

“There have been things said that he doesn’t suit the car, and everyone thinks that I do suit the car and the car is made around me and all of that stuff, but it couldn’t be more untrue,” he said on Beyond the Grid podcast. 

“Not that I hate driving the car I am driving now, but it’s very unsuited to my driving style.

“I would say at the beginning of the year it suited Daniel a lot more than it suited me in terms of how you had to drive it. 

“That’s something I really struggled with at the beginning of the season and I’m coping with or have adapted to it a lot more now. 

“I would say [I’ve become] more well suited to it.”

“But it is far from a car that I would want in an ideal world. If I wanted to go and do the best lap possible and you give me that car to go and do so, it is definitely not the car that I have now.

“We do drive in different ways, and therefore what we request from the car is quite different. But by no means is it anywhere near more adapted to me than to him.

“I’ve had to adapt a lot more to the car. There’s not a lot that the team can do for me in terms of car. They just make it as quick as possible all round. 

“It’s not like, ‘Lando said this and we’re just going to do that, and Daniel, we’re not going to do that’. That’s just stupid to ever think.

“I feel like I am driving a pretty similar car in terms of characteristics as the car I drove in my first year in Formula 1. It’s changed in little ways, but nothing I would say now is more adapted to me than in my first year of racing.”

Norris backed Ricciardo to find a new seat for the F1 2023 season: “I think he’s proven in his career how quick he is, what he achieved when joining Red Bull, the wins he did — he never won a boring race, he always won exciting ones, did it in style.

“He proved it many times — in Monaco when he had to deliver in qualifying and stuff like that he could do exactly that.

“I don’t need to say it. I think everyone knows how good he is and what he can achieve.”

Norris and Ricciardo are among the top earners in the 2022 list of F1 driver salaries.

The final year of Ricciardo’s contract was was paid off.

He will now consider other opportunities - there are vacant seats at Alpine, Haas, Williams and the possibility also exists to take a hiatus from F1.