Formula 1: victory at last for a rising British talent
Three days before the Miami Grand Prix, Lando Norris “sat in the McLaren hospitality suite” and admitted the “circuit was not one of his favourites”, said Molly Hudson in The Times. Yet the British driver is likely to have revised that opinion in the wake of Sunday’s race. Competing in his 110th Grand Prix, “the 24-year-old produced a mature, calm drive to register his first Formula 1 race victory”. Long hailed as a major talent, Norris has had an unusual number of near misses since making his debut in 2019, said Tom Cary in The Daily Telegraph. Before Sunday’s triumph, he had been on the podium 15 times – the most in F1 history without a win – and had finished second on eight occasions. At times, he’d had such bad luck he “must have felt cursed”. At the 2021 Russian Grand Prix he’d led for most of the race but, having “stayed on dry tyres as rain fell in the final laps”, was “caught at the death by Lewis Hamilton”.
Like many F1 drivers, Norris owes his start in the sport to his wealthy parents, said Sathnam Sanghera in The Times. His father, Adam Norris, is an investor thought to be worth more than £200m. Norris grew up in Somerset and attended Millfield School, but his already intense motorsport commitments meant he didn’t do his GCSEs. By his mid-teens, he was regularly winning major go-karting competitions. After making the transition to car racing, Norris joined McLaren’s young-driver programme aged 17, and made his F1 debut two years later, said Tom Cary. The Wokingbased team were emerging from a spell in the doldrums, a period McLaren’s then-boss, Éric Boullier, characterised as a “proper disaster”. But recently their performances have improved, and they’re “starting to look seriously competitive again”.
Norris admittedly got lucky on Sunday with the timing of a safety car, said Giles Richards in The Guardian. When it was called, on lap 29, he alone of the leading drivers had yet to change tyres – and so he was in the lead. Normally, that advantage would have been temporary, but because he could pit with the safety car out, he lost far less time than usual, and remained ahead of the field when normal racing resumed. The remainder of the race was “impossibly tense”, as second-placed Max Verstappen loomed in Norris’s mirrors, desperately looking for a chance to overtake. But under the most “intense, pressurised” conditions of his career, Norris held firm for 24 laps, and closed out the race “like a champion”. For someone who has always been “much admired” by his fellow drivers and the public alike, this victory was a long-overdue “vindication”. Finally, Norris has shown the world that he has “the skill and verve to compete with the best”, in fact even better – the very best.