McLaren rookie Lando Norris says he intends to continue in the sim racing world alongside his Formula 1 duties, believing it will be of benefit to his development.
Norris, 19, steps up to Formula 1 this year off the back of a strong record in junior motorsport, winning the 2017 Formula 3 title and placing second in Formula 2 last season.
Norris is an active member of the sim racing world and competes for Team Redline, which included partnering with Max Verstappen during a recent attempt at an endurance race.
“There’s definitely things you can learn from a strategy perspective,” Norris explained.
“I like the endurance races; we go through hours and hours of preparation trying to do set-up stuff, from the side of things you learn a lot about different cars and a lot of it relates very well back to an F1 car.
“There’s ride heights, cambers, wings, tyre pressure, just staying involved, knowing what everything does, if you go with this wing you can get away with lower ride height, which sometimes people don’t know.
“A lot of it is for enjoyment point of it, I love driving on the sim and doing races, putting time and effort in and hopefully getting the result out of it.
“I can learn from people like Max, or not just real-life drivers but people who drive in the sim they know a lot about how to set up a car.
“For Bathurst, we had a proper engineer from MP Motorsport, we had another simulator guy who runs a company in the Netherlands. There’s a lot of wise people that you can learn from and it’s not just drivers.
“So I’ll 100% try and do more, I’m not going to have as much as time as in the off-season, but if I can do more races I’d 100% like to [do more sim racing].
“Between Team Redline, the team Max and myself are part of, we’ll aim to do some more races in the future.”
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