When Lando Norris crossed the finish line at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix last weekend, his life changed in an instant.
But the new world champion still had to follow a familiar course: the celebratory donuts on the Yas Marina pit straight, soaking up the fizzy rose water on the podium and endless media sessions.
Norris, Formula One’s 35th world champion, didn’t seem to mind any of this. As the early hours of the next day approached, the 26-year-old McLaren driver left the Yas Marina paddock. Although he’d been swigging “way more” than an energy drink from his sponsored bottle for some time post-race, finally, the proper party could begin.
He headed to the huge W hotel that straddles the Abu Dhabi track’s final sector to celebrate with his family, friends and plenty of hangers-on. Inevitably, renditions of “We Are The Champions” and “Sweet Caroline” soon blared.
Norris told reporters the next day that he carried on partying until 6 a.m.
A disappointing trip to McDonald’s followed.
“I really wanted some McNuggets, but it was the morning, so they didn’t have any left,” he said. “I had a Sausage McMuffin. Was it the breakfast of champions? Certainly not. I regretted it straightaway.”
Norris had a raft of interviews to complete as his head pounded. Next day, he was back at the wheel of his MCL39 for a tire test. Such is how all F1 seasons end these days – with more track time.
F1’s title celebrations have taken place in many locations over its 75-year history. The season’s champion isn’t officially crowned until the FIA’s prize-giving gala. For Norris, this event happened in Uzbekistan on Friday.
The stories from down the years about how a driver celebrated their first world title show the intense pressure behind F1’s sleek surface. They also reveal what happens when that pressure is finally lifted.
Norris’ late night and nixed nuggets will become his title’s quirky footnote. Previous champions let go with more abandon – stand by for thrown televisions, forklift joyrides and team bosses brawling with bouncers at the victory parties.
Beer, brawls and forklift joyrides
Norris’ 2025 triumph is reminiscent of the 1976 championship clinched by his British compatriot, and fellow McLaren driver, James Hunt.
Although the sporting action played out in contrasting ways — there were also no shocking, near-fatal crashes this season — Norris shares Hunt’s laid-back demeanor. And both went up against famous rivals who lived to drive racing cars. For Max Verstappen in 2025, read Niki Lauda back then.
In the 1976 Japanese GP, Hunt secured his first and only F1 title. It had seemed destined to go to Lauda until the Austrian’s near-fatal crash at the German GP that year.
When he crossed the line, Hunt thought he had lost. Back then, driver-to-pitwall communication was nothing like the constant data streams and radio channels in F1 today. As he climbed from his car, Hunt berated McLaren team boss Teddy Mayer about confusing pit-stop signals late in the wet race — unaware the crowd was cheering him as the new world champion.
“I didn’t want to let myself think I’d won if I hadn’t. The disappointment would’ve been terrible,” Hunt later told reporters. “Then everyone started shouting that I’d won and I realized that I really had.”
Once confirmed as the title winner, Hunt was “seldom seen without a can of beer,” according to the late journalist Eoin Young in Autosport magazine. Hunt and other McLaren personnel flew home to London. In 1976, that journey involved a refueling stop in Anchorage, Alaska.
“Most people slept for much of the distance from Tokyo and were reasonably refreshed by Anchorage, but Hunt was still going, seemingly fueled but by no means overfilled by a constant intake of ale,” wrote Young.
“I tell the plane story only to illustrate a side of Hunt’s complex character, a young man relaxed after the rigors of a hard year, now happy inside and showing it outside, the tenseness gone.”
That extra parallel between Hunt and Norris, who felt the pressure of a three-way decider in Abu Dhabi last week, extends to one of F1’s most successful champions, Michael Schumacher. McLaren team boss Andrea Stella referenced the legendary German driver — for whom Stella worked as a performance engineer at Ferrari in the early 2000s — in the aftermath of Norris’ triumph.
But it wasn’t just about the release of season-long title battle pressure. Schumacher had a scrappy final race in 2003, but like Norris finishing third last Sunday, he eventually came home in the eighth-place minimum position he’d needed in the decisive Japanese GP.
Michael Schumacher celebrates his 2003 world title with Andrea Stella, right, and other Ferrari staff. (Clive Mason / Getty Images)
“(Abu Dhabi 2025) reminded me very much of 2003,” Stella said last Sunday. “A (championship) that ended after the last race, there were a few bumps towards the end, and the whole season was very tense and balanced.”
Post-race at Suzuka 2003, Schumacher and his younger brother Ralf, then racing for Williams, began the celebrations, which started with several Ferrari team members shaving their heads. But that was only the start of the escalation to come.
The siblings — joined at various points by other F1 drivers — at multiple stages threw a TV from an office window and went joyriding on a paddock forklift truck. The elder Schumacher lost his Ferrari shirt and ended up soaked in alcohol while wearing another from the rival Toyota team. At one stage in a nearby restaurant, he grabbed some of McLaren driver Kimi Räikkönen’s spaghetti dinner straight from his plate.
“Much jolly banter ensued,” declared Autosport.
Ferrari opted not to discipline its star driver over the chaos.
In 2010, Adrian Newey’s Red Bull team scooped both the constructors’ and drivers’ prizes, with Sebastian Vettel winning the latter, ahead of his teammate and Oscar Piastri’s current manager, Mark Webber.
Like McLaren this year, Red Bull clinched the constructors’ title early, when Vettel won the Brazilian GP. In his 2017 autobiography, Newey recalls throwing a last-minute championship party at a quirky country house in the suburbs of São Paulo. Christian Horner, the Red Bull team boss, and Newey arrived late.
“We couldn’t find the entrance, so we wandered around the back and saw our boys behind metal crowd barriers, drinking Champagne,” Newey wrote. “As we both climbed over, a bunch of ape-like Brazilian bouncers appeared to stop us getting in. They weren’t having any of it. First, they picked up Christian around his middle and turfed him back over the metal barrier, as a dog would do with its puppy, then they made a move on me.”
Mechanics eventually rescued Newey and Horner but the two never made it into the party. At the next race, after Vettel’s Abu Dhabi 2010 win had secured his first of four titles, remarkably, the same thing happened again.
“We staggered back to the hotel, where there was an impromptu party in one of the function rooms,” wrote Newey. “Once again, when Christian and I tried to get into our party, we were turned away by the bouncers on the door, only this time we said, ‘That’s it’, and the pair of us rushed the bouncers, pushed past them, and finally got into our own party.”
Max Verstappen celebrates with his team after winning the 2021 title in Abu Dhabi (Bryn Lennon / Getty Images)
When Abu Dhabi became Party Central
The Red Bull/Vettel dominance ended in 2014, when Mercedes ended their 59-year F1 championship drought. From 2014 to 2020, Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg then won seven drivers’ titles in a row for the Silver Arrows. The team also claimed eight consecutive constructors’ titles, up to 2021. With their prolonged success, Mercedes made their end-of-year celebration at an Abu Dhabi hotel a yearly tradition.
“We were never great party people or celebration people,” Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff said when The Athletic asked for his favorite memories of such celebrations. “Even after racing, sometimes, (we’d say), ‘OK, let’s ditch the photo and jump on the earlier flight’. And then Aldo Costa (Mercedes’ former engineering chief) said to us, ‘We’re not celebrating the wins enough here’. And we tried to be better at that.”
Mercedes made the Abu Dhabi hotel parties an annual ritual, Wolff said, with attendees’ phones dutifully collected at the door to prevent any incriminating footage from leaking. The system worked — until 2021, when someone kept their device and captured Wolff crowdsurfing in the early hours after Hamilton’s crushing title defeat to Verstappen. “What a surprise alcohol can do to people, including myself,” Wolff said. “Those evenings, Sunday nights in Abu Dhabi, throughout the years, were really nice moments to remember.”
But while Abu Dhabi has been hosting F1’s end-of-season parties for the past 11 years, it has held only four title deciders. Hamilton celebrated championship wins in Austin, Texas (twice), Mexico (also twice) and Turkey. Max Verstappen followed his 2021 Abu Dhabi title with celebrations in Suzuka, Qatar and Las Vegas.
Verstappen started his 2024 celebrations with a beer at the news conference. Then, he hit the streets of Sin City – race winner George Russell saw him still partying at nine the next morning. “I was leaving for the airport,” said Russell.
Red Bull couldn’t back up Verstappen’s 2024 title with another constructors’ celebration because by then, McLaren had dethroned them at the head of the F1 pack. Others were also staking a claim.
The 2024 constructors’ title battle boiled to a conclusion in the Abu Dhabi finale, where Norris’ win ahead of Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz denied the Italian team by 14 points.
As McLaren’s celebration in the paddock unfolded, staff were whisked to the nearby airport. The Bahrain royal family, which owns McLaren through its sovereign wealth fund, arranged for the entire team to be flown across the Persian Gulf.
“The party was somewhat unexpected,” Tom Stallard, Piastri’s race engineer, told Sky Sports. “It only really got announced to the team after we’d won the championship.
“They’d changed every bulb in Bahrain to papaya orange, so, from the air, the whole of Bahrain was bright orange, which looked amazing. They’d changed the mobile network (name) to ‘McLaren F1 champs.’”
The overnight party took place at the palace of Bahrain’s Crown Prince, after which McLaren staff were taken back to Abu Dhabi to either prepare for the 2024 tire test or catch their scheduled flights home.
The Bahrain royal family was in the Yas Marina paddock on Sunday to take in Norris’ triumph and Piastri’s disappointment.
But while the W hotel turned orange to honor the former in the race’s aftermath, there was no repeat of McLaren’s overnight flight to Bahrain. Instead, simple celebratory joys: booze, belted-out classic songs and a failed search for chicken nuggets.
