The outpouring of relief and pride – and the release of tension – in Lando Norris’s incredibly raw reaction to becoming Formula 1 world champion laid bare his gruelling process of turning self-described embarrassment and doubt into a career-changing accomplishment.
Two Norris journeys have collided to bring him to celebrate his maiden title.
There is the one that has consumed his and his family’s life for 20-odd years, hence Norris fighting back tears on several occasions through Sunday evening – even in media commitments two hours past the end of the race – as he choked out heartfelt ‘thank yous’ and thought of the six-year-old version of himself that dreamed of being anywhere near this achievement.
Then there is the nine-month battle that has been the 2025 season: one that has at times fuelled the kind of second-guessing that Norris has had to work to control since he got into F1 in 2019, and has put plenty of critics on his case in the process.
Once both journeys came to the most successful end possible in Abu Dhabi, the release from Norris was remarkable – for its candidness, its longevity, and what it revealed about how much this world championship has really taken.
He’s carried a huge emotional weight
As newly crowned champions do, Norris bounced around for two hours or so after finishing the race.
He went from one F1 TV camera to another, was afforded the briefest of celebrations with his nearest and dearest and a podium appearance in between, then did the lengthy rounds with all the waiting broadcasters in the media pen before heading to the press conference for a solo appearance with written media and then finally finished with yet another sit-down again F1’s cameras.
But even though he was being pulled from pillar to post for so long, Norris had so much to get off his chest that the fizz of joy and pride, the moments his breath caught in his own throat, and the incisive self-criticism that makes him a unique world champion, was somehow sustained from start to finish.
It reflected both the huge emotional weight that Norris has carried this season, and the person behind the driver. Norris is one of F1’s most engaging, curious, and intelligent people to speak to. He will be a unique world champion for the way he dissects his own weaknesses and limitations, discusses his nerves and his imperfections, and yet can celebrate incredible successes.
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Norris can make missteps in interviews – his honesty has got the better of him on more than one occasion, as he admitted on Sunday evening! – and his retreat into a bubble at times can come across as standoffish or a manifestation of the classic sporting mentality that ‘you’re either with me, or against me’.
It can be a wholly necessary part of the process. Norris need not justify that to anybody. But to spend so much time after his triumph fizzing with energy and speaking with such warmth and honesty to a collection of media that has scrutinised him to new levels in 2025 showed his true character.
Early embarrassment fuelled doubts
Norris’s season started perfectly with a win in Australia, but even that was not without its challenges as he survived two moments to just about beat Max Verstappen to victory.
And then the first third of the year developed a common theme: Norris kept making mistakes. Some little, such as qualifying errors in China, Bahrain and Canada that hurt his results there; some big, like crashing in Saudi Arabia qualifying or driving into the back of Oscar Piastri in Canada.
“Not the most impressive,” he says of his first half of the season.
“Certainly times I made some mistakes, made some bad judgments. I made my errors.”
The pace was there. The execution was not. Norris’s big world championship chance was slipping away and the doubts he even had about himself seemed to be turning into reality.
In his early years in F1, Norris came close to questioning his place on the grid. He talked of not being sure he deserved it, if he was really good enough. It is rare for an F1 driver to exhibit imposter syndrome but that is the impression Norris gave.
He has grown more comfortable in his own skin over time and certainly rising to a level of being a regular race winner seemed to help. But fighting for a championship is another test entirely, and demands a performance level and consistency that drivers are hitherto not challenged by.
Hence the doubts returned, especially as Piastri looked the more assured and was sometimes simply too fast for Norris to beat. There are mistakes from that run in which Norris “embarrassed myself” and wishes he could undo.
“But how I managed to turn all of that [around] and have the second half of the season that I had is what makes me very proud, that I’ve been able to prove myself wrong,” says Norris.
The unseen changes
There were two parts of the year in which Norris’s situation looked bleak.
The first came after that sustained run of small and large errors undermining his speed. The second came when he was not only second-best to Piastri immediately after the summer break at Zandvoort but also suffered an engine failure that dropped him to 34 points off the lead with nine races remaining.
Without some crucial self-awareness and expanding his bubble after the early setbacks, Norris could have crumbled.
Asked by The Race if he felt his chance was slipping away at that point in the early phase of the season, and when he started to make changes, Norris admitted that after the first half-a-dozen races he realised “my way is not working”.
He was struggling with the changes to the 2025 McLaren that had made it incredibly fast but had dulled the feeling from the front end that did not combine well with the sensitivity Norris has through the steering wheel. That and his own approach, getting carried away and chasing too much in qualifying, created an unusually high error-rate.
So Norris says he started to wonder: “I’ve got to understand things differently. I’ve got to speak to more people. I’ve got to understand what I’m thinking, why I’m thinking it. ‘Why am I doing this? Why am I getting tense in qualifying? Why am I making the decisions that I’m making?’ Whatever it may be.
“Certainly, the bad run of results and lack of performance – not speed, because I think the speed’s always there, but lack of putting things together when I had the capability of putting things together, opened up the doors to go and understand: ‘OK, I need to do more than just try again next weekend. I need to try and understand things on a deeper level mentally’.
“That opened up understanding myself more, understanding things more at a championship level – that’s the level I’ve got to be at.”
This resulted in Norris going “above and beyond in terms of expanding my group” that changed the way he worked off-track and who he worked with. He added more people to his inner circle, which he describes as “working with more professionals in different areas”, but also changed his simulator routine and his trackside approach.
No title without early errors
What Norris went through is a more extreme manifestation of the cliche that you learn the most on your bad days. But it is to Norris’s credit that he did not dig his heels in and insist what he was doing would work in the end.
In fact, without the early struggles making him realise that he did need to do things differently to up his game, he suspects that he would not have been world champion.
One example is how he responded to falling 34 points behind Piastri after the Zandvoort DNF. There was a school of thought that this took the pressure of Norris and allowed him to more easily tap into his best, but Norris actually disputes the characterisation.
As he says: “When I see 34 points against a guy who’s in the same car, who’s doing an incredible job, who I know is incredibly quick, that didn’t fill me with confidence. And it wasn’t like, ‘I’ve got nothing to lose now, I can just go’.
“I felt like I was trying to do everything I could before, and I continued to try and do everything I could after. But I just had to step up what I was doing away from the track.
“I had to dig deep and try and understand more things quicker and in a more advanced way than I ever have before. That’s what gave me the advantage I had.
“When you saw that, I had that run of great results, which is ultimately what got me the championship in the end.”
Norris characterises this as “the struggles turned into strengths” and suspects he would not have caught on to what he needed to quickly enough if the early setbacks had happened at the end of the year instead.
It gave him the time to work out what was going wrong and still influence the outcome. Norris couldn’t change the mistakes that had already been made but the fact the vast majority of his self-inflicted losses came in the first half of the year and his most convincing run of form came in the second is testament to how he pulled things together much more effectively.
“When I got in that kind of good rhythm in the last three months, almost when there’s been more pressure than ever, it was almost when I felt most comfortable and most confident into qualifying,” he says.
“I could go from chatting to my engineers and having a fun time with my mechanics to going out and getting pole a few minutes later.
“The struggle at the beginning really allowed me to unlock my potential later on.”
He won it his way
Even before this season Norris had come in for plenty of flak over the way he races.
Supremely fast at his best, and a clearly competent wheel-to-wheel racer, Norris nevertheless has never had the reputation of someone who makes things happen with his racecraft. He is so quick that his best moments usually come in the form of simply obliterating the opposition.
Whether it was first-lap errors, seemingly being bullied by Verstappen in battle last year, getting stuck in races or making mistakes while Piastri looked rock solid in the first half of this season, Norris has had his resolve questioned at times.
So one of the things he is so proud of in becoming world champions that he won it “my way: by being a fair driver, by trying to be an honest driver”. Norris is very conscious of how some perceive him, and he does not even dispute the differences with the likes of Verstappen or other champions such as Michael Schumacher or Ayrton Senna. But he doesn’t want to be like them.
“At times, could I have been more aggressive and got off the brakes and had a few people over? I certainly could have done, and maybe I would need to do more of that in the future,” he says.
“But did I need to do it this year? Is that the way I want to go racing? Is that me? It’s not.
“I’m sure if you compare me, if that’s what you want to do, to all the champions: have I been as aggressive as them at times? No. Have I been as daring as them at times? No.
“But did I do just what I needed to do to win the world championship? Did I perform consistently? Did I perform when I needed to under the most pressure? Post-Zandvoort, did I come back in the way I had to? Did I have three, four weekends of great results?
“I did. And I performed when I needed to perform to win the world championship this season.”
Norris was asked a few times about the significance of beating Verstappen given some of the contrasts in their approaches and reputations, but had little interest in engaging in it.
He seems at peace with being able to beat Verstappen at his best and being beaten by Verstappen when he falls short of that standard and isn’t judging the magnitude of his achievements against one driver.
“I certainly feel like at moments I’ve driven better than I feel like other people can,” he says. “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.
“They struggled with the car in the mid part of the season. They’ve had an incredible second half of the season. They took advantage of the fact we had two of us fighting for a world championship.
“He really made the most of that and Max drove like he is a four-time world champion. And I’m very happy that I got to race against him and try to prove myself against him.
“Whether then you want to write whatever you want to write, against him, against me, or whatever it is, feel free. 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’ve just done what I’ve needed to do to win the world championship. That’s it. And I made my people happy.”
The unexpected regret he shared
The energy and honesty of Norris’s post-race debriefs led him down an unexpected tangent at one point.
In the process of responding to a question about winning a championship by being true to himself and the person and driver he wants to be, Norris shared a surprise regret about the way he has spoken at times.
In the middle of a 600-word answer, Norris suddenly changes direction, saying: “I know at times I say some stupid things, and I say some things about Max, or I might have said some things at times in the past that everyone talks about, about Lewis. Some things I regret and I wish I could take back and never have come out my mouth.
“But I honestly believe I give more respect to anyone else than anyone else. I give more respect to Oscar. I give more respect to Max. I try and give as much respect as I can to Lewis – he’s a seven-time world champion, he’s the best driver…you compare him to Schumacher, the best driver that’s ever been in Formula 1.
“I’m not even close to that. I might never be. I dream of those kind of things. I dreamed of today, and I’ve managed to achieve one of seven, comparing to him.
“And do I regret some of the comments I might have said in cooldown rooms or whatever it is? Yes. But a lot of those are in the heat of the moment. And by the time I’ve said it, I’ve gone, ‘Why the hell did I just say that?'”
This sort of thing has weighed on Norris before as he has told The Race previously that he doesn’t always phrase things the best way but he genuinely doesn’t intend to be disrespectful or incendiary.
And so Norris was clearly very keen to use his moment to try to set the record straight. It seemed completely organic, not something pre-planned at all.
Shaking when title looked on
Inevitably, much of Norris’s post-race reflections were very big picture. So he faced very few questions at all about the race itself.
When he did, the most telling part of his answer was that he refused to think about the title until very, very late on. That might be the best example of how Norris managed to get himself into the state of mind to be process-driven, which he says is “boring” but realised it was necessary.
Not getting carried away with the outcome and trying to remain completely focused on the job at hand is a critical part of mind management in sport.
Whatever nerves Norris had going into the race he handled well by executing a clean first lap and making robust, decisive moves when he had to in the race – most notably when having to pass Verstappen’s team-mate Yuki Tsunoda.
The championship situation crept into his periphery a few times. Norris says that when Tsunoda weaved and squeezed him on the straight “you’re like, ‘damn, if that was five centimetres closer, it’s over'”.
And in the final laps he admits he “stopped taking any kerbs because, if that just makes one piece of the car undo itself, it’s over”.
Other than that, Norris seemed to successfully treat it as “just another race” – until he got three corners from the end and “I started to shake a little bit”, as he finally allowed the magnitude of this season and his career culmination to start washing over him.
