Lando Norris repeated one thing more than anything else after winning his first world title: “I did it my way.” It’s true; there has never been a Formula 1 champion quite like him before.
Norris clinched his maiden championship with a gutsy and well-measured drive to third in a tense Abu Dhabi finale, but it was an achievement built on a lot more than that one result alone. As Laurence Edmondson wrote on Sunday night, Norris’ victory was the culmination of a season of self-doubt and rebirth, a vindication of the raw openness that he has made his calling card.
Seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton was one of the drivers to congratulate his fellow countryman in the TV pen on Sunday, shaking his hand and giving him a hug. “I told you you could do it,” the Ferrari driver said. As Norris admitted during his long news conference on Sunday, and as he has time and time again during his career, there have been genuine moments he did not, in fact, believe he could achieve this.
“I think it’s great that people can be showing their vulnerability,” Hamilton told the written press shortly after his moment with Norris in the TV pen. “It’s a real thing in today’s world. It should be taken seriously.”
Norris might well be the most vulnerable champion Formula 1 has ever had. As he echoed the line most synonymous with the famous Frank Sinatra song, there was a subtext to it that went unsaid: He’s done it his way, but he’s done it his way in an environment where that is not the norm. Norris has been one of the grid’s strongest advocates of embracing and acknowledging weakness and imperfection in a cutthroat sporting environment that shuns the idea of both.
It was telling after the race that people talked just as much about Lando Norris the man as they did Lando Norris the driver. Former teammate Carlos Sainz, one half of the popular McLaren partnership dubbed “CarLando” in 2019 and 2020, praised the Brit for staying true to himself through it all.
“Honesty, very happy for him. I think he’s a great F1 driver. I think unbelievably fast,” Sainz said. “But with his particular way of going about life and things, as much as he’s got criticized a lot during the last few years for being how he is, he’s world champion and everyone can keep dreaming about being F1 world champion while he goes about his own way and does things his own way. So I’m extremely happy for him because he must have felt a lot of pressure over the last few weekends and he managed to pull it off.”
In another interview, Sainz added that Norris won despite not confirming to the stereotype that you need to be “ruthless or badass” to be a champion, while saying that “you can be a world champion while being a nice guy.” There was certainly some truth to that view point.
Norris’ ruthlessness, or a lack thereof, had long been criticized before he wrapped up his first title. This part of his personality has been apparent in a lot of ways this year. One of the remarkable points of 2025 had been the three-way fight between Norris, teammate Oscar Piastri and the now-former world champion Max Verstappen, and how it had stayed relatively good natured through to the end. Each got to the Abu Dhabi finale in very different ways but without, perhaps, some of the animosity that has featured in other noteworthy championship contests in Formula 1.
That perhaps speaks to the fact that Verstappen was something of an uninvited guest to the title showdown, with his mesmerizing form down the stretch, but is also largely down to the differing personalities between the contenders. Norris had several opportunities to take the bait but didn’t.
Two weeks ago, responding to Verstappen’s insinuation that he would have wrapped up the title if he were driving for McLaren, Norris said: “It’s Red Bull’s way of going about things. It’s this kind of aggressive nature and just talking nonsense a lot of the time.”
The more aggressive nature certainly is not one Norris shares with Verstappen, something he has readily admitted. The contrasts between F1’s 34th and 35th world champions are stark. Verstappen has become one of the most captivating people in the sport and is absolutely his own man in everything he does. He is unapologetically himself, just like Norris, but is very different in that he is a much more private individual, someone far less willing to entertain many of the questions that float around the F1 media ecosystem every week.
To put it more simply, Verstappen is a far more outwardly straightforward character than Norris. The Dutchman is capable of brutal and raw honesty from time to time, as he showed on Sunday, appearing to be briefly choked up while talking about some of the season’s lower moments, before reacting with genuine anger at a question posed to him about his Spanish Grand Prix clash with George Russell.
In terms of how he conducts himself and how he seems to view the business of winning and competing, though, Verstappen is more like the great champions of old — Hamilton, Ayrton Senna, Niki Lauda, Nigel Mansell — than Norris. In going from Verstappen to Norris, F1 has a very different man as world champion — and that’s not intended to be a criticism of the four-time champ, merely an acknowledgement of their differences.
Mind over matter
When Norris arrived on the Formula 1 scene as a spotty, baby-faced teenager in 2019, he was a breath of fresh air, one who instantly connected with a fanbase that was rapidly skewing younger and more diverse than ever before. Norris seemed like the perfect Gen Z pin-up: he loved gaming, he understood memes and he seemed to be finding his feet in a strange world dominated by older generations.
In those days, Norris was a joker whose media appearances often descended into farce or bouts of hysterical laughter. One memorable example was when a whispered dirty joke from Daniel Ricciardo reduced him to uncontrollable tears of laughter during a news conference ahead of that year’s British Grand Prix. Norris appeared to be a happy-go-lucky young man who was enjoying every bit of the career he was stepping into.
Appearances can be deceiving.
Years later, Norris admitted he was “depressed a lot of the time” during his rookie season, which was plagued with bouts of anxiety and sleepless nights. As might be true for large chunks of the population who lived through it, the COVID-19 lockdown seemed to have a transformative effect on Norris and his understanding of not only himself, but what he needed to do to thrive in the darkness moments.
The “new normal” that the global population adjusted to during the pandemic gave Norris and many of his fellow F1 rivals a chance to race and game together online. He became particularly regular on the streaming platform Twitch, which often saw him talking at length with fans assembled in his chat. While plenty of drivers across motor racing were doing it, the Norris streams were notable; he broke numerous streaming records during the three-month delay to F1’s 2020 season and saw his social media followings explode.
It seemed a perfect place for Norris to just be himself. Here he was no longer talking to the world in the conventional F1 media, looking down a camera lens with a microphone in front of him waiting for a soundbite or barely rehearsed reaction quote, it was all him, from the comfort of his own home, in front of an audience of fans just happy to be engaging with him in a meaningful way. It helped Norris see the value in being unashamedly himself, even if that meant admitting he was not the perfectly polished human being we sometimes expect or believe the world’s most successful athletes to be.
He became a frequent advocate of the wellness app Headspace, speaking about it ahead of F1’s return to racing in July 2020, where he quickly picked up the first podium of his career. Norris had found his voice. The man who emerged from the weird and uncertain times of 2020 and 2021 found himself able to freely talk about topics that were taboo in the wider world only a few year earlier — topics that might still have been considered a no-go zone in the cutthroat and competitive world of Formula 1.
“Despite making it to F1 — something I had dreamt of ever since I began racing — I found myself questioning my own self-belief: worrying if I had what it took, comparing myself with my teammate and other drivers,” Norris wrote for the website of wellness charity Mind, which he has been closely associated with since COVID, in 2021. “It screws with your head. It’s tough to deal with and I’m sure many other drivers have struggled with it in the past.”
Speaking so candidly had a wider impact than just on his own wellbeing. Norris was one of the athletes ESPN interviewed specifically for a series of features around Mental Health Awareness Week in 2021, where he spoke candidly about how eye-opening those Twitch streams had been for him.
“[During lockdown] I was getting messages from people saying how I’d impacted them and how me being me … how I’d changed their lives, or I guess as deep as them saying they were thinking about suicide and stuff like that, saying how I’d had an impact on changing that.
“Seeing a lot of those messages and learning about that made me realize I can use my platform a lot more to speak up about it because it’s things I’ve struggled with in the past, and [it’s about] knowing and learning how much of a difference I can have on people around the world. That’s when I started speaking out about it a bit more and realizing that maybe it’s not always the nicest thing to talk about, but it’s something where I can help a lot of other people out.”
Doing it his way
It was perhaps because Norris was so willing to show such humanity that a narrative about his temperament grew in the way it did. Until his breakthrough at the Maimi Grand Prix last year, he had carried the unfortunate label of “Lando No Wins,” a title that largely hinged around how he and McLaren had squandered victory in the rain during the closing laps of the 2021 Russian Grand Prix. Even his breakthrough win and his emergence as a championship contender did not stop his willingness to show a more vulnerable side. Last October, in the midst of what turned out to be a failed title challenge against Verstappen, Norris admitted to often having race-day nerves that would make eating a struggle.
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Max Verstappen reacts to Lando Norris claiming his first F1 world championship
Check out how Oscar Piastri and other drivers reacted to Lando Norris claiming his first Formula One championship title.
Occasionally, his on-track performances seemed to correlate. Early on in his days as a race-winning driver, he seemed incapable of holding onto the lead of a race on the opening lap when he had started from pole. That run became an unfortunate one when framed from the perspective of his perceived lack of grit.
The same was true of how he seemed to stutter down the stretch in his 2024 title battle with Verstappen. In particular, Norris’ error-strewn race at the decisive Brazilian Grand Prix was an unfortunate contrast to Verstappen’s victory, which put the Dutchman on the verge of the title and was immediately heralded as one of the great performances of F1’s modern age.
One piece of criticism last year from the Red Bull camp around that time seemed to particularly sting.
“We know Norris has some mental weaknesses,” Red Bull’s outspoken advisor and regular pot stirrer Helmut Marko told Motorsport-Magazin. “I’ve read about some of the rituals he needs to do to perform well on race day.”
The quote infuriated McLaren CEO Zak Brown, who accused Marko of setting the sport back “10 or 20 years” with his comments.
It was no surprise that quietening the outside noise became a key theme of his title-winning 2025 season. He entered the year as the bookies’ overwhelming favorite, a position bolstered by his superior F1 experience over PIastri and the fact that McLaren had clearly emerged from preseason with the fastest car.
A victory in testing conditions in Australia — which included heavy rain, three safety-car periods and a short trip across the travel trap — seemed to suggest Norris had gained a new resilience over the break, but tough times quickly re-emerged. He soon found himself battling back from the brink to save his season. For the first third of 2025, he looked like a man crumbling under the expectation of what was supposed to be a first championship season.
He spoke about those tougher times at length on Sunday. Those difficult moments in his rookie season and the frankness he had expressed time and time again during his life came back to help him. While people on the outside questioned his fortitude, he backed his own process, believed that his way was the right way, and finally things clicked into place as Piastri’s form started to wobble in the final months of the campaign.
Lots of quotes from Norris stood out on Sunday. He spoke for hours, honestly, openly and without a care in the world what anyone but his close friends and family assembled with him really thought about anything.
One answer summed up how different Norris is to those who have won titles before him. Usually drivers wait until they’re retired before they suggest they aren’t the best driver in Formula 1, but even after achieving a success that meant, officially for 2026, he is the benchmark all others must be judged against, he sounded like a man who did not care if he truly is the best or not. In a world like Formula 1, that is rare, and it is remarkable.
“This is all for you guys to decide whether someone’s better than someone else or not,” he said. “All I try and do every weekend is the best of what I can. But then you decide he’s better than him, or he’s got a worse car and he’s doing better — write what you like, decide what you like.
“I certainly feel like at moments I’ve driven better than I feel like other people can, and I feel like I drove at a level I don’t think other people can match, but have I also made my mistakes? Have I made more mistakes than other people at times? Yes. Is there stuff Max could do better at times than me? Yes. Do I believe he’s unbeatable? No.
“But my motivation is not here to prove I’m better than someone else. That’s not what makes me happy. I’m not going to wake up tomorrow and go, ‘I’m so happy because I beat Max.’ I honestly, deep down, don’t care about that. I don’t care if every article is, ‘Do you think he’s better than me?’ or, ‘Oscar’s better’ or whatever it is. Doesn’t matter. I have no interest in that. I’ve just done what I’ve needed to do to win the world championship. That’s it.”
