Norris generally races with his long-time race engineer Will Joseph manning the radio, but on occasion, Joseph has been swapping roles with Norris' performance engineer Jose Manuel Lopez, including in various sessions over the last couple of race weekends.
When asked about the plan behind rotating race engineers, which is not that common across the grid, team principal Andrea Stella said the team wants to build enough cover for an exhausting 24-race calendar next year, while also raising the general experience level of Woking's core group of engineers.
"The reason why you see there's a group of engineers supporting each driver rather than the classic two or three engineers is because we want to attack a couple of objectives," Stella explained.
"The first one is that we have 24 races and it starts to become a challenge, even at a personal level, to make sure you can cover all the races.
"This is in terms of planning but this is also in terms of what happens if we have an emergency and we need to substitute one of the race engineers, so we want to create a long bench or a long group of people that can support the driver.
"Without going into the specifics of one engineer or the other, I'm very pleased with how this process is leading to a very competent group of engineers that can interact with the drivers."
Lopez has been Norris' performance engineer since 2020 and has therefore already built a strong connection with his driver. The Spaniard was previously employed in F1 by Haas.
Source: Autosport