Lando Norris is sitting in the temporary McLaren hospitality unit sucking on a lollipop. With each passing second, he draws harder on the candy in his mouth. He’s not enjoying it especially, but it is a method of taking out his frustration at having been wiped out of the 2024 Austrian Grand Prix by Max Verstappen.
As Norris sat there seething over his inability to overtake the Red Bull driver cleanly and go on to win the race, there is also a sense that somewhere in the red mist was a settling notion that he now knew what he needed to do to take on the reigning world champion.
Having witnessed Norris’s rise to F1 and experienced the jubilant highs and painful lows of his career, this was a seminal moment and a feeling that continued to develop over the rest of the 2024 season.
As he battled with Verstappen, banging wheels in Austin and Mexico City, each blow may have felt like a blow to his chances of beating the Dutchman to the title, but they should have also served to hammer home what he now needed to do himself to be crowned world champion.
Carlos Sainz, Scuderia Ferrari, 2nd position, Lando Norris, McLaren F1 Team, 1st position, celebrate on the podium with Champagne
Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images
At the season finale in Abu Dhabi, in an exclusive interview for Autosport, Norris explained how he had learned more during the 2024 season than he had in his previous three years racing. He’d come out on the other side understanding more about how to win races, and how to be in a position of fighting for a championship. Above all, he said he “learned what I need to be, to be a champion. It is a different mentality”.
The question is, can he take that mentality into this season and maintain it when things don’t always go to plan?
Crafting of a future world champion
Norris’s interview in Abu Dhabi was a fitting location, for that weekend, he had shown the mental resilience to finish first and ahead of the Ferrari’s of Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc to secure McLaren the constructors’ title. But the Yas Marina Circuit was also the venue where he was introduced to F1 media for the first time, at a roundtable interview.
It was 2017 and he was like a rabbit in the headlights as he was grilled about his boyhood hero, MotoGP legend, Valentino Rossi, who he had a poster of on his bedroom wall.
He was still just a kid in that moment. What seemed like not many years before that interview, when Norris was seven, he had begun karting, influenced by his older brother, Oliver. The two brothers competed in the junior ranks, but it quickly became apparent that the younger had more talent. As the level of competition increased, the education at the fee-paying Millfield School in Somerset took a back seat. A tutor that travelled with the brothers soon found that karting had taken up the majority of the time and Norris would eventually quit his education before sitting his exams.
His father, Adam, enlisted the help of Mark Berryman and Fraser Sheader of ADD Management to nurture the young Norris’ career and to mastermind his development. Together, they plotted their way and rattled through the junior ranks. No sooner had Norris wrapped up the championship, he was off testing in the class above to give him a head start in the next series.
Norris’s ascendancy was rapid but his management team required extra help to open the doors to F1. For that, they approached Zak Brown, then working for his own agency, JMI, and who would later become CEO of McLaren Racing.
It was under Brown’s watch that Norris was signed as a junior driver to McLaren’s programme. Brown was also responsible for handing Norris the role as McLaren’s reserve driver for 2018, only to promote him the following season to a full-time seat.
Last season, as well as being the last man standing in the fight to stop Verstappen from taking his fourth straight title, Norris also recorded his first win in Miami.
There were other victories, too, at Verstappen’s home race in Zandvoort, a stunning performance in Singapore where he won by a country mile, and the constructors’ championship-deciding Abu Dhabi GP.
Lando Norris, McLaren MCL38, 1st position, takes the chequered flag as his team cheers from the pit wall
Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / Motorsport Images
His current rate of development is akin to his performances in his junior career where he would accelerate his learning from season to season, with the karting and eventual open-wheel titles earned in quick succession.
Norris now says he knows what to do in order to deliver the drivers’ championship. He’s just got to go out there and do it.
In this article
Ben Hunt
Formula 1
Lando Norris
McLaren
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