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How Lando Norris became World Champion
7 months ago
Competing with a Carlin-Volkswagen in the 2017 FIA Formula 3 European Championship
There are always several fast kids in these lower categories, but what stuck with me was that the people who worked with Lando back then all talked about what a nice kid he was. His father Adam is a very successful businessman, which meant that Lando was always in a position to be with the top teams and have an excellent support structure around him. But there was never any sense along the way that he was some spoilt rich kid. In fact, he is still the same charming, cheeky, grounded young lad, which is a massive credit to Adam and Lando’s mother, Cisca.
Unlike someone like George Russell or Max Verstappen, both of whom always spoke and behaved with incredible self assurance, Lando always seemed a bit less confident. I remember meeting George when he was a young teenager in F4 and even spending some time with Charles Leclerc back when he was doing Formula 3 a decade ago – they just oozed this confidence that they would be the big dog in F1 soon. It wasn’t arrogance, just enormous self belief. I don’t think Lando ever carried that with him. Perhaps now he will.
As I mentioned, his father Adam put together a good structure of key people who have been with Lando right from his karting days. Mark Berryman and Fraser Sheader at ADD Management have guided Lando throughout his career and know him incredibly well. They are the closest confidants he’s got when he’s at the track, along with his physio, Jon Malvern, another person who has been on a long journey with Lando. It was really nice to see all of them under the podium with Lando’s family as they have lived and breathed the emotional roller coaster together.
"Athletes also need ways to get out of the pressure cooker and relax, and once again for Lando, his private team has done a good job"
I always believe that human beings – especially athletes – need people that they can trust to call them out and be honest with them, but in the right way. They want you to do better. It’s not just criticism for the sake of it. When Lando was making errors at the start of the season in qualifying (five mistakes in the first 10 qualifying sessions gave the early initiative to Oscar), this group of people was there to support him, remind him that he didn’t need to chase an extra 10 metres under braking for the hairpin, and give him the belief that he was lacking by saying things like, ‘You are fast enough to win this – stop trying so hard in areas where you don’t need to.’
Athletes also need ways to get out of the pressure cooker and relax, and once again for Lando, his private team has done a good job of helping him find the balance, managing his time but also, for example, taking karts to different tracks around Europe so he can go out and keep sharp whenever he wants away from the glare of cameras.
McLaren has obviously been a huge factor in creating the new World Champion and while it’s a massive team of over a thousand people, there are a few key individuals who have been closest to Lando and helped him to develop. Zak Brown deserves a lot of credit for backing Lando at an early age. He brought the young British driver into the fold early on, having been a friendly advisor to Lando’s family in his junior formula days. When Fernando Alonso had had enough of the McLaren nightmare in 2018, Zak went for a whole new line-up with Carlos Sainz coming over from Renault and Lando joining the team as a rookie after a period as their development driver.
“In the early years, it seemed to me that Lando perhaps needed more hand holding than the team recognised. There were various instances of questions being asked of him where the answer would be a ‘dunno’ or a ‘you decide’, and it took some time to build up really effective communication”
Bringing Andrea Stella and Rob Marshall in to steer the ship technically has been key to McLaren’s success and has meant that since 2023, McLaren has gone from being a backmarker, to challenging for the odd podium, to regular race winners and now back-to-back Constructors’ champions. That also meant that the drivers had to raise their game because all of a sudden the expectations and pressure to succeed changed.
If I had to pick two key people at McLaren who have been vital in the ‘evolution of Lando’, from debutant to World Champion, it would be his race engineer Will Joseph and his performance engineer Andrew Jarvis. For any racing driver, the relationship they have with their race engineer and performance engineer is absolutely critical to success. They are the ones that are part engineers and part psychologists. They need to be able to read the driver’s mind and find a way to decipher what they are thinking while feeding them bits of information or encouragement as and when it’s needed.
I have been lucky to spend a lot of time listening to the team radio chatter between Lando and Will over the years. Joseph had come off the back of a bruising period of being barked at by an increasingly frustrated Alonso, so having the opportunity to shape and mould a young, enthusiastic and likeable rookie must have been a breath of fresh air. But in the early years, it seemed to me that Lando perhaps needed more hand holding than the team recognised. There were various instances of questions being asked of him where the answer would be a ‘dunno’ or a ‘you decide’, and it took some time to build up really effective communication.
The relationship between Lando and Will Joseph has blossomed
The Russian Grand Prix in 2021 was a great example. Norris had done a superb job to take the first pole position of his career and led the race with great assurance. However, there was a sting in the tail with rain coming towards the latter stages when he had Lewis Hamilton right behind him. The radio calls that day put the emphasis on a 22-year-old chasing his first ever win, with the pressure of a seven-time World Champion right behind him. The team was asking Lando to make the calls on whether he was happy to stay out on slicks or not. It was too much to ask and, ultimately, he and the team got it wrong.
Now that Lando is much more experienced, he is of course in a better position to make those big calls, but his engineers have also learned what he wants from them – what information he needs to make a decision, or sometimes taking the decision making power away from him altogether. Little changes in the way Will communicates, such as, ‘Lando, if we do X then Y, Z will happen. Do you think it’s a good idea?’ has just improved the way they make these high pressure decisions together.
Trusting in your team to dig you out of a hole when things don’t go to plan is also extremely important. Think of Hungary this year when, on the opening lap, Lando got boxed in and dropped to fifth. Will presented an alternative option of a one-stop strategy and walked him through the implications before giving the right encouragement his driver needed to execute it. That, I believe, was a key weekend just before the summer break, giving Lando not only another victory but also the confidence he needed – in himself and his guys – to deliver a superb second half of the season. He really took control of the championship fight with a dominant win in Mexico and a flawless sprint weekend in Brazil.
I’m very pleased for Lando. He’s a great ambassador for the sport and incredibly popular with the fans. The boys love him because he’s a bit of a lad, the girls love him because he’s a cheeky chappy and the rest of the paddock likes him because he’s not an arse. The Lando stand at Silverstone next year is going to be absolutely rammed, I’m sure!
