Lando Norris' race engineer sends warning to rivals after McLaren star's first win: "The upgrade favors some traits of Imola more than it does Miami"

Lando Norris' race engineer Will Joseph has claimed that the upgrade package brought by McLaren would be more suited to the Imola track than the Miami Autodrome. Joseph's comments come after the team managed to beat Red Bull in a straight fight at the Miami GP.

Norris got his first-ever F1 win in the Sunshine State a couple of weeks ago. He finished ahead of Max Verstappen by a margin of over seven seconds in the latter half of the Miami Grand Prix.

McLaren had brought a massive upgrade package prior to the race that seemed to work to their liking and closed the gap to the world champions on track.

While appearing on the F1 Nation podcast, Joseph mentioned that the team was way more optimistic heading into Imola about the package than they were in Miami. Lando Norris' race engineer said:

“The upgrade that we brought was ginormous in size. [It was an] extraordinary effort by everyone back at McLaren to bring all those upgrades out to Miami. It was unfortunate we couldn’t put every single piece on both cars, but each car had a good amount of upgrades.

“Oscar [Piastri] will receive the second part of that package when we get to Imola. If anything, the upgrade favours some of the traits of Imola more than it does Miami. So everyone’s very very excited about what this could hold for the future.”

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McLaren team boss Andrea Stella explains how Lando Norris learned from Sochi 2021 to secure his his first win

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella stated that the 2021 Russian GP heartbreak they suffered was more down to the team than Lando Norris.

Norris notably secured pole position in qualifying and led for the majority of the race. However, he ultimately finished seventh as he and the team chose to not switch to intermediate tyres as conditions in Sochi worsened.

Looking back at that race while speaking about Norris' Miami GP victory on the F1 Nation podcast, Stella said:

“We go back to Russia – an important learning as well along the same lines. You review, and you understand how you have to improve. That one was very important for the team as well.

“I think the team picked out of Russia more than what actually Lando picked out of that race because the call should have come from the team to pit in Russia. It was our responsibility in that case, we learned our lesson and we move forward.”

Lando Norris and McLaren will be optimistic heading to Imola, where they scored back-to-back podiums in 2021 and 2022.