Backed by his family, propelled by his talent: the rise of Lando Norris

Lando Norris has become Britain's 11th Formula 1 world champion, and delivered on a destiny that seemed set since he was a young boy.

The 26-year-old, whose father Adam is a multimillionaire who made his fortune as a pensions trader, started racing karts at the age of eight, and was on pole position for his first national event.

Norris, who has dual Belgian nationality through his mother Cisca, was born in Bristol and grew up in Glastonbury. Educated at Millfield in Somerset, as his career blossomed, it became increasingly hard to find time to attend school, and there was a fair bit of home tutoring involved.

His junior career marked him out as a potential future F1 world champion. His family's resources ensured he was provided with everything he needed to allow his talent to flourish. And when he made it to F1, he immediately proved he had what it took.

Norris has won the title in his seventh season, and spent his entire F1 career with McLaren, with whom he has kept faith as they have grown from also-rans to F1's leading team.

His boss there is American Zak Brown, McLaren Racing's chief executive officer, who has been involved with Norris since before either were at the team.

Norris' career was funded by his father until he reached F1, and he was guided through his karting years by his manager Mark Berryman.

But when Norris took his first steps in car racing, they did not have the necessary contacts. They turned to Brown - then the boss of a sports marketing agency called JMI, and well known in F1 as a deal maker and sponsor finder.

Initially, Brown felt "this is not what I do". But Norris' team were persistent. Brown says: "I thought: 'All right, everyone tells me he is the greatest thing since sliced bread, maybe I can help.'"

When Brown started paying attention, he realised Norris was the real deal "pretty much right away".

He was not the only one. Stephanie Carlin started working with Norris as he made his first steps in the junior categories aged 15, continued to do so until he made it to F1 four years later, and is now McLaren's F1 business operations director.

"He was just phenomenally quick," she says, "and he was able to execute it really well. There's been an underlying talent and speed and pace that's existed from the first time he got in a car."

Norris was almost certainly too good not to make it to F1, but his path was eased considerably when Brown joined McLaren in 2016, a couple of years after he started working with Norris.

In January 2018, Brown paired 18-year-old Norris with then McLaren driver Fernando Alonso, an F1 legend, in the Daytona 24 Hours sportscar race in his United Autosports team.

Norris gave himself the target of setting a faster lap than Alonso - and achieved it. He stunned people with his pace in the wet at night before the car eventually retired.

"Fernando Alonso, one of the best racing drivers in the world, Lando was his match," Brown says. "Cold tyres, middle of the night Daytona, if you asked Richard Dean, who ran them, who was better, he wouldn't know."

When Alonso announced he was quitting F1 at the end of 2018, Norris was the obvious replacement, and McLaren started giving him experience in practice sessions.

Having proved faster than one McLaren race driver, Stoffel Vandoorne, in his first outing, his next was at Monza, with Alonso in the other car.

Brown recalls: "They're swapping times. Fernando has just set his time, so he's done, and obviously paying attention to what times Lando is doing. He's asking.

"We come on the radio and we go: 'Fernando, Lando's on a lap, get out of his way.'

"First sector, same 10th. Second sector, Lando is half a 10th up. Third sector, on the radio, Fernando: 'Sorry, I didn't see him.' Lando: 'Fernando just blocked me!' And we all just giggled on the pit wall, like, 'Welcome to Formula 1.'

"So when you see those things, you just think: 'This guy's mega.'"

A few races later, Norris jokingly served Alonso a cup of tea during a wet practice session at the US Grand Prix in Austin. Soon, he was the apprentice no longer.

In his debut season in 2019, Norris was immediately a match for his team-mate Carlos Sainz, who had four years' experience, and he destroyed then seven-time race-winner Daniel Ricciardo when the Australian joined the team in 2021.

By then, Alonso had returned to F1 after two years in other categories. He and Norris swapped helmets. The Spaniard wrote on the one he gave to Norris: "You are a star - a rock star."

Norris quickly became a fan favourite, with his diffident-but-jokey personality, and willingness to show his true self on social media. His public profile built through the pandemic as he live-streamed himself playing video games, and he used that to build his own gaming and lifestyle brand.

Brown says: "He used to be very shy and he still kind of is a quiet, shy guy in his own way. Even though he kind of comes off as extroverted, he's actually not. But as he's become more mature, I have seen him become more comfortable in his skin.

"He has never lacked confidence. He was a young kid when I first met him, he was 14. So what I've seen outside of becoming a better racing driver, (is) a better team leader, more prescriptive in what he wants. And his on-track performance has grown with it."

Norris based himself in Woking, the location of the McLaren factory, when he first graduated to F1, the better to integrate with the team, but after three years he took the traditional F1 driver's life decision and moved to Monaco for financial reasons.

By then, it had long been obvious Norris' talent marked him out as one of the leading lights of the new generation of drivers, along with his compatriot George Russell and Ferrari's Charles Leclerc.

But it has taken time for Norris to establish himself as a front-runner in F1.

In their first few years together, the McLaren car was not competitive, although Norris came close to a win with a superb performance in Russia in 2021, only to misjudge the incoming weather and not pit for wet tyres in a late downpour.

Norris kept the faith, signing two contract extensions, despite interest from Red Bull. That, Brown says, was down to "relationships, transparency, visibility to what we were doing. He's comfortable here. This has been his family since day one."

Norris' career trajectory turned midway through 2023, a year that started with a restructuring of McLaren's engineering group by Andrea Stella, who had accepted Brown's offer to become team principal the previous December.

Carlin joined McLaren at the beginning of 2024. It had been more than five years since she had worked with Norris in F2.

"I sat in engineering and heard him giving feedback," she says, "and I was blown away. I just could not believe the development of this teenager I'd known, a very successful F2 driver and champion in F3 and F4. It was incredible."

Those first five years in F1 had turned a boy into a man, and a promising driver full of potential into one of the best in the world. But there was still learning to be done.

After a slow start to 2024, a development to the McLaren car at the Miami Grand Prix in May made the team absolutely competitive. Norris took his maiden win that weekend, and later three further victories as it began to look as if he could challenge for the title.

In the end, the head start Red Bull's Max Verstappen had established in the first five races of the year was too much. A few small Norris errors along the way did not help.

A year on, Norris' development has continued apace.

"Lando has always been really open about what he feels his weaknesses are as much as what he feels his strengths are," Carlin says.

"That's one of the things that's attracted the most negative publicity around him because he's been so open about that. And because he's open about it, people see it as a weakness. But actually what it's turning out to be is his absolute strength.

"He's used it as a development tool. He's used it throughout his career and then he's really used it this year because at the start of the season he was struggling to adapt to the characteristics of the car and he looked like he was, to the rest of the world, questioning himself.

"What he was actually doing was developing himself. And that's really been demonstrated this season."

Norris started this year with a win in Australia, but after that the first part of the season was a struggle. His team-mate Oscar Piastri had progressed significantly through some assiduous work with the team over the winter, and Norris was not feeling the car in the way he needed to be quick.

Developments over the winter had made the new car faster, but introduced what the drivers called a "numbness" to the front axle, which was preventing Norris' ability to exploit the car.

A tweak to the front suspension was developed to improve Norris' feel, and introduced in Canada in June. It was not an overnight fix, and was relatively minor in nature, but undoubtedly after that the trend line of Norris' trajectory was a positive one.

Despite falling 34 points behind Piastri at the end of August, Norris has clinched the title just nine races later.

Norris attributes his resilience to the "good group of people around me, to support me, to direct me, help me, whether it's been a good weekend or a bad weekend, people who always have my best interest at heart and are there to give me the right mentality when I'm down.

"Two reasons I've done well are: one, I've done a better job, so I'm performing better more often; and two, I'm not always more positive, but I'm more positive and less negative about when I have bad days and bad sessions. And I believe in myself a bit more that I can turn it around.

"A lot of work away from the track with different people. A lot of work at the track. But it all starts with my team around me."

Stella has a phrase for this. He calls it "acknowledging the gap to perfection" - a description he has used for Alonso's approach to his career. It means that however good a driver is, they look to their weaknesses, and work on mitigating them. It is a constantly evolving process.

F1 drivers generally don't talk about this stuff, and if they do it tends to be in an allusive manner that tries to hide any weaknesses.

Carlin says: "He doesn't see that as a weakness because he's such an authentic, genuine person. It's not even in his nature to hide that process.

"To some extent, you've got to be in the environment to challenge you. And although Lando's had a few seasons in F1 now, he's not had multiple seasons in condition to be a championship contender.

"So he's continued to develop through his F1 career, but to some extent the rate of your development is constrained by the extent of your potential. And if your potential is limited by various factors, such as your car and relative pace to other teams, then that has an impact on how far you can develop at what pace.

"But when he's been delivered with a car capable of challenging for the championship, his own development has accelerated to match that.

"So it's with those great opportunities and those greatest challenges that his development rate has actually sped up, to kind of mirror-image that."

Which should mean there is more to come.