Lando Norris

“I’m just excited to have another crack at it,” is Lando Norris’ approach to the 2025 Formula 1 drivers’ championship on the eve of the opening round in Melbourne.

If the McLaren driver is at all chastened by last season’s ultimately forlorn attempt to topple Max Verstappen, he is not letting it show ahead of the new campaign.

Norris ran Verstappen closer than anybody in 2024 but still fell well short of wrestling the crown away from the Dutchman, even if McLaren – with Oscar Piastri also weighing in heavily – did take the constructors’ spoils for the first time since 1998.

Dubious team orders, questions over his capability to cut it at the very top and Verstappen’s wily race craft all, at different stages of the season, had to be dealt with by Norris.

Now though, he is looking back on his scraps with Verstappen as experiences that should hold him in good stead this time around.

“I learned a lot of things last year,” he said. “I clearly wasn’t quite ready to deliver on everything that we needed to deliver on from a racing point of view. That’s just because racing against Max is a unique situation, and you don’t get to experience it in any other way of life until you really get to that point.

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing RB20, battles with Lando Norris, McLaren MCL38

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

“Had it been a battle against different drivers, I don’t know if it would have been the same. It definitely probably wouldn’t have been as hard.

“That’s probably a fair assessment because I do think Max will be the hardest guy to race against. He’s always going to be the one who’s going to be most willing to push the limits and push the boundaries like he did. So I learned that aspect of Max.

“I learned where I stood in that situation, which was not at the right level. I learned from those things. I’m just excited to have another crack at it and see what I can do.”

While singling out Verstappen, Norris also named several others that he expects to battle against for the title, including Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton, as well as Piastri.

A blot on the McLaren playbook from 2024 was the inter-team rivalry between Piastri and Norris, which at times threatened to derail its quest in both championships leading to the introduction of ‘Papaya Rules’.

Essentially, it was an attempt to give a cute name to team orders presenting the pair with their rules of engagement for the remaining races. But Norris revealed that the duo will be able to race one another at the start of the season, beginning with Piastri’s home race at Albert Park.

“There are no Papaya Rules, at the minute there’s nothing,” said the four-time grand prix winner.

Lando Norris, McLaren F1 Team, 2nd position, Oscar Piastri, McLaren F1 Team, 1st position, congratulate each other in Parc Ferme

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

“We’re free to race. We’re happy to go against each other and compete. Of course, we have to know that we’re going to be against each other a lot this season and I hope we are. 

“But our strength last season was helping one another and always giving each other a good amount of room, racing fair. Those kinds of things.

“That was our strength last season, and we need to maintain that. That’s one of our biggest things as a team. It’s always going to be tough because we want to beat one another.

“That’s inevitable at the end of the day. At the minute, there are lines that we can’t cross as team-mates. Just keep both cars on track and don’t let any debris fly. Apart from that, we’re happy to race. We’re excited to race against one another and push each other to the limit.”

Having ended last year with the fastest car and putting in a strong showing in Bahrain pre-season testing, many have picked McLaren to be the dominant team throughout 2025 – but Norris again moved to dismiss those claims.

“I’m quite surprised so many people are so short-sighted, especially people you wouldn’t expect to be, making so many conclusions before you even start the season,” he said.

“Everyone just wants to play that game of looking like the underdog and playing it down. People can talk what they want. We’ve kept to ourselves, we’ve kept focused, and we want to be quick.

“We expect to be up there fighting but I don’t think you can think by the margin that everyone’s saying.”

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.