Lando Norris knows full well that he is a member of one of the most exclusive clubs on Earth. “Formula 1 is 20 people in the world.” He sounds a little awed. “And that’s it.”
Not only is the 25-year-old in that club, right now he’s the one everyone is chasing. Last month he won the Australian Grand Prix, the opening race of the 2025 F1 season, and finished second in the Shanghai Grand Prix to his McLaren colleague Oscar Piastri. The 2024 season was his best since he began racing for McLaren in 2019, finishing runner-up in the driver’s championship with 13 podium finishes including four wins. Those performances stole momentum — and the limelight — from the dominant Red Bull team: their haughty talisman, Max Verstappen, and combative team principle, Christian Horner. For Norris it was an exhilarating year. “It’s made me want it even more. I want to be the champion.”
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If that sounds like typical F1 talk — all gas and machismo — it’s not how Norris comes across. It is lunchtime in Bahrain and when he appears in an expressionless room in the bowels of a racetrack garage dressed in orange McLaren overalls, curly hair framing a baby face, he seems gentle, contemplative and occasionally uncertain. When he considers a question he casts his eyes heavenwards and speaks slowly and carefully, as if worried about being misunderstood.
The wariness is understandable: whatever he says reverberates around the world. The market research company Nielsen Sport found last year that F1 reaches an annual audience of 750 million. Between 2021 and 2024 the sport added 50 million new fans. Much of this is surely thanks to Netflix’s Drive to Survive — an F1 branding exercise that has turned the sport into an adrenalised, blockbuster franchise, attracting a whole new fanbase to the sport. It also addressed its previously irresolvable problem: that its competitors wear helmets, robbing the spectacle of much of its human drama. According to a 2023 YouGov sports white paper, more than 6.8 million viewers watched Drive to Survive, with 26 per cent of fans having no prior interest in F1. To them, these dashing men in supercars are just multimillionaire A-listers with dangerous jobs.
In some ways Norris is just that. He lives in an airy apartment surrounded by palm trees in the tax haven of Monaco. (“People do many things in life for money,” he said of the move, “this is just another one.”) He earns £15 million a year. He’s an adrenaline junkie. “I love driving, I love the competition,” he says. “I love speed.”
In fact, what you see is what you get: not for nothing is he held up as the poster boy for thoughtful petrolheads. He is keen to get more women into F1 and to lessen its (terrible) environmental impact, flying thousands of people, kit and cars around the world for ten months (in 2022 F1 generated an estimated 223,031 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent — F1 says it wants to achieve net-zero carbon by 2030). He rhapsodises about his team. He has very long eyelashes.
Norris has also been strikingly open about the toll of the competition on mental health. He has said he was “depressed a lot of time” in his first season, affected by the pressure to perform and hold on to his seat in the McLaren car. “I spoke up about the mental health side of things and the struggles I did have, especially in the first two or three years of my career in Formula 1.” He has “adapted” now, he says, crediting his team and family for helping him to work on his resilience, but notes that it “does take time and experience and some deal better with it than others. Some people aren’t affected at all. Some people are heavily affected.” He has worked as an ambassador for the mental health charity Mind.
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When we speak, the F1 season, ten months of motor oil, pole positions and champagne-drenched podiums in 21 countries across five continents, is about to begin and he is revving up to go again. It’s a long, hot slog: “Out of all the other people that do racing, you’ve got to think about how you can beat them. You’ve got to work harder and smarter than every other driver.”
Born in Bristol in 1999, Norris started karting aged seven. His mother, Cisca, is Belgian and his father, Adam, is a British retired pensions manager who made a fortune — estimated at £200 million, at last count — at the investment company Hargreaves Lansdown. He is the second of four siblings: he has an older brother, Oliver, who also did karting as a child, and two younger sisters, Cisca and Flo. Norris boarded at Millfield School in Somerset (fees: £16,000 a term) but left without sitting his GCSEs. “I struggled with the balance of school and driving because all I wanted to think about was driving,” he says. As a teen he would sometimes spend 14 hours a day on racing simulators.
He was “14 or 15” when he started to think about it as a career: “I knew that racing was the only thing I really enjoyed doing.” After winning a clutch of junior titles in 2017, he joined McLaren’s driver academy programme and became its test and reserve driver at 17. He made his F1 debut in 2019, becoming one of the youngest British F1 drivers in history. He found “the eyes, the cameras, quite daunting. Dealing with them is not an easy thing, and it’s a big part of being an F1 driver.”
Backgrounds like Norris’s are not uncommon in elite sport (his sister Flo is a competitive showjumper). “From my family’s side of things, I was very lucky that they were able to support me.” F1 undeniably has an access problem: karting can easily cost £100,000 a year, across equipment, coaching, travel and buying or renting the kart, and as you move up the ranks expenses escalate. Formula 2 — the second tier of single-seater racing — can cost a driver as much as £1.5 million a year and is usually covered either by sponsorship or family wealth. “It’s very expensive, which is unfortunate because it means not as many people can start in the first place. You want it to be as accessible as possible. But that’s just the way it is.”
If wealth greases the wheels, however, staying in pole position season after season takes grit and talent. “His natural ability is phenomenal,” says Will Joseph, director of race engineering at McLaren, whom Drive to Survive fans might recognise as the man in Norris’s ear as he reaches speeds of 200mph. “And often we [McLaren] perform at our best when he performs at a subconscious level, without having to give the driving much thought.”
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His introspection and tendency to self-criticism come in useful on the track. “The foundation that allows Lando to succeed is how open and with how much humility he shows in receiving feedback and criticism,” says his performance coach Jon Malvern, 34, who has worked with the driver since he was 13. “He genuinely listens to [feedback], no matter how uncomfortable it makes him feel at the time.” He’s a fast learner, with “an amazing ability of leaving the track one evening frustrated and then returning the following day having digested it, with ways to overcome the issue,” Joseph adds. As to his attitude? “He is a kind-natured person,” Malvern says. “But extremely competitive.”
Mental ruthlessness is one part of success, physical ruthlessness another. Grands prix are not a Netflix highlights reel, but a feat of endurance. Races last up to 90 minutes, with temperatures inside the car reaching 50C. The force that is exerted on drivers as they accelerate, decelerate and turn is staggering: the corners on some tracks can cause drivers to shoulder six times their own body weight. Drivers can lose 4kg sweating during races. “For a lot of people that just switch on the TV, they probably don’t understand the physical side of things,” Norris says. “I was very small when I started. So I was always a little bit behind. I’ve had to adapt physically.” (Norris is just 5ft 8in.)
He runs, cycles and does weights, and trains in heat chambers. F1 drivers must have powerful neck muscles to withstand the extreme forces in the car. Norris “hates” the training, but it pays off. “I don’t get tired over the season. I don’t struggle with the heat inside of the car. I don’t struggle mentally and I’m able to deal with a lot of stuff going on at the same time, make good decisions and communicate with my team in the best way possible. It’s a big part of it.”
Workouts, natural talent and a steely mindset have taken him far. But there is undoubtedly something else — something thrillingly alchemical — that has shaped Norris’s career: his friendship and rivalry with Verstappen.
In so many ways Verstappen, 27, is the anti-Norris. The Dutch driver is part of a dynasty — his father, Jos, was a F1 driver and his mother, Sophie Kumpen, a kart racer — and was bred for the sport, and he carries himself with all the entitlement of that lineage: he is cocksure in the paddock, aggressive — and occasionally foul-mouthed — on the track. Before he puts down the visor to compete, his eyes flash like a stone cold killer’s. For seasons Verstappen has been relentless: in 2023 he won 19 of the 22 grands prix on the circuit, including 10 on the trot, cruising to the championship title by almost 300 points. Last season, though, Norris pushed Verstappen, including taking a symbolic victory at the Dutch Grand Prix in Zandvoort, Verstappen’s unofficial home track.
The latest season of Drive to Survive has an episode focusing on Verstappen and Norris, titled Frenemies, that plays up the rivalry, exaggerating their yin and yang. Verstappen is presented as cool, assured and a little robotic, Norris as the plucky, emotional upstart (to drive the point home it shares a clip of him playing with a tangle of puppies). It spotlights the fallout of an incident at the Austrian Grand Prix in 2024, where the pair collided after some muscular tactics on Verstappen’s part. The episode certainly makes things between the two men look a bit tetchy.
The reality is perhaps more nuanced. They have known each other since they were kids, when they competed for junior titles. Off the track they play padel and golf, muck about on race simulators and are often spotted on (private) planes together. Verstappen has called Norris his “best friend on the grid”; Norris has agreed they are “very good friends”. How does he deal with being friends with his rivals on the track? “I’m a guy who treats them as two different worlds,” he says. “When I’m not on the track, I’m here to live my life, to share it with people. If that means I’m friends with some of the drivers and we play tennis or padel or golf, drive on the simulator — that’s how I want to live my life.”
Even your fiercest rivals. “As soon as the helmet’s on, you forget about all of these things,” he says. “It’s a different world, you’re in a different mental state. You don’t give the guy one more metre because you’re friends with him or do a sport with him, right? In my view it’s the opposite. It makes you give them one less metre because you’re able to trust them more. But then you also know how they act, when to maybe not trust them. It is a complicated balance but it’s not a bad one in my eyes.” He cites his older brother: “He’s always the biggest competitor I’ve had. That’s the same as with your friends. You always want to beat them and prove that you’re better. So those guys are my biggest competitors but my friends off the track — and when I’m on track I want to beat them more than anything.”
Compartmentalising sounds healthy, even if Netflix has bet on its punters preferring Ayrton Senna v Alain Prost, whose legendary, petrol-fuelled rivalry lit up the sport in the 1980s and 1990s. The new series airs after we speak, although since it did Norris has spoken up about what he sees as the manipulation of his and Verstappen’s friendship. “They need to show the truth about people more,” he said before the Melbourne Grand Prix. “I’m not a fan of fake stuff. I want facts, I don’t want made-up scripts and fabricated nonsense. There’s drama, [Netflix] can just show the facts of the drama. They don’t need to do anything more than that.”
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Norris seems to have a strong sense of justice. “He is a very honest person, and works best when people are honest and frank with him too,” his race engineer says. “If he feels strongly about something, he will say it.”
“It was interesting to see him grapple with the increase in spotlight and the public perception that came when part of a title race against Max Verstappen, a more experienced and canny competitor,” says the Sunday Times F1 correspondent, Molly Hudson. “This year there is a notable difference; he is embracing the ‘favourite’ tag, albeit naturally playing it down wherever he can, and is generally more relaxed.”
Characteristically this seems to be something he has worked on too. “It’s not just going out and driving on track,” Norris says. “But it’s how I can be best prepared mentally in every situation — to be more relaxed in these interviews, being myself and saying what I believe in, not saying things other people want to hear. Being happy with myself. That’s not as easy as it sounds, especially when you have so many cameras around.”
His rocks amid the tempest are his parents, who are regularly pitside to watch him compete — even if his mother does worry about her son hurtling around tracks at 200mph. He’s single since the end of his relationship with the Portuguese model Luisinha Oliveira. It must be hard to hold down a girlfriend, partly because he spends ten months of the year crossing continents, and partly because when they were going out she was sent death threats by many of his female fans.
Even when the cameras are off, he’s never really offline. He plays games live on the streaming platform Twitch, to an audience of 1.7 million. He shares everything from gym sessions to haircuts to podium finishes with his 9.6 million Instagram followers. There’s no let-up. Norris has to get back in the cockpit, back on the track, back into pole position. “This is the year,” he says. “I want to see if I can do it.”
