Lando Norris has revealed that he “wasn’t very confident” prior to his rookie Formula 1 season and had doubts that he would be sufficiently competitive.
Norris stepped up to Formula 1 this year with McLaren off the back of taking the 2017 European Formula 3 title and second in the 2018 Formula 2 standings.
Norris, 19, became the fourth-youngest driver in Formula 1 history when he lined up on the grid in Australia.
Norris went on to score points in 11 of the 21 grands prix, making Q3 on 14 occasions, to place 11th in the Drivers’ Championship.
“I think I can be very happy from how the whole season has gone from myself and from the team,” said Norris.
“Starting with myself, there’s been a lot of good things.
“Coming into the season, I wasn’t very confident with how I was going to do, so I’m happy I kind of proved myself wrong and have done a good job and been able to give myself more confidence and improved as a driver. I’m very happy about that.
“[I didn’t know] if I was going to be good enough, as simple as that.
“I didn’t know if I was going to be quick enough going up against a driver who’s done four years in F1 in McLaren and just in F1 against so many good drivers, I didn’t know if I was going to be able to do a good enough job every time.
“I just didn’t believe in myself much but already after Australia and Bahrain, I already gained a lot of confidence. It was simply not knowing if I was going to be able to keep up.”
Norris said he would have felt the same irrespective of when he stepped up to a full-time race seat.
“I think even if I did another year of testing I would have been the same,” he said.
“Just going into things you can’t prepare for basically. The pressure of going into qualifying, the pressure of going into the race, thinking about however many things.
“There’s so many things you can practice in pre-season testing and everything but it still all changes when you are in the moment of doing qualifying and the race.
“The pressure of racing people is all very different to testing.
“Sometimes I was fast in testing and just as quick as Fernando [Alonso] or Stoffel [Vandoorne] and that gave me a bit of confidence but it didn’t mean anything going into Australia in terms of being able to nail qualifying and the race.
“It’s still completely different, so that’s why and another year of testing wouldn’t have changed how I felt about any of that.”
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