How Norris fulfilled his F1 world championship dream

I’m happy,” said an emotional Lando Norris after claiming the 2025 Formula 1 drivers’ championship in Abu Dhabi. “I just won it my way. I’m happy I could go out and be myself.”

What that meant was a journey distinguished by crises of confidence and a nagging sense of self-doubt as well as great speed, tenacity, and outstanding racecraft.

Those who placed their bets according to the outcome of the first grand prix of 2025 were in for a turbulent ride. A picture already seemed to be developing of McLaren technical superiority, based on polesitter and winner Norris’s margin over reigning champion Max Verstappen in qualifying.

As Norris drove to what seemed like an unruffled victory (but that actually included a similar off to the one that hurt his McLaren colleague) in mixed weather conditions, while team-mate Oscar Piastri came a-cropper in front of his home crowd, a natural order seemed to be suggesting itself.

Further down the grid, newly promoted F1 debutant Isack Hadjar delayed the race start by getting his Racing Bulls car crossed up on the wet formation lap and becoming a passenger as it smashed into the barrier. As with the championship protagonists, it might have been tempting to form an impression of the relative qualities of the newcomers, too.

Over the course of the following eight months and 23 races, though, Norris – along with his team in some cases – contrived to make life difficult for themselves at times, resulting in a dramatic three-way decider in Abu Dhabi.

Norris slithered to victory in Melbourne as Piastri erred

Photo by: Erick W Rasco / Sports Illustrated via Getty Images

Hadjar, meanwhile, recovered from his setback to become one of the most impressive newcomers of the year, earning another promotion at the end of the season as Red Bull’s leaders decided to enact yet another change of occupant in the garage next door to Verstappen’s.

The first signs of the championship being less than straightforward for McLaren manifested themselves in the Chinese GP weekend that followed Australia.

There, Ferrari made what would prove to be a cameo appearance in the winners’ circle as Lewis Hamilton won from pole in the sprint race; his subsequent disqualification from the grand prix for excess skid block wear, accompanied by team-mate Charles Leclerc’s exclusion for being underweight, showed how close to the margins Ferrari was running to stay in the hunt.

Chief among the lessons from Suzuka was that, despite all the resource spent in the quest to make overtaking more possible, performance convergence had closed this window again

For Norris it was a taste of what was to come and he had a scrappy weekend, struggling through sprint qualifying and the race, making a costly error in grand prix qualifying, then having his charge in Sunday’s race blunted by a long brake pedal. By contrast, Piastri looked untroubled as he won from pole.

In Japan, both McLaren drivers underperformed in qualifying, enabling Verstappen to annex pole and win what would prove to be a processional race. Chief among the lessons from Suzuka was that, despite all the resource thrown at this generation of cars in the grand quest to make overtaking more possible, performance convergence had now closed this window again, not helped by an increase in ‘dirty air’ as designers grabbed back downforce.

That, and the fact that Pirelli had given the drivers what they had been demanding for so long: tyres they could push on for longer, less prone to thermal degradation. Well, be careful what you wish for.

Verstappen’s Suzuka success laid down a notable marker

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Sutton Images via Getty Images

Verstappen digs in, Piastri stakes his claim

Suzuka also represented a turning point in the internal political battle raging at Red Bull. The hapless Liam Lawson had already been given the heave-ho after just two races, swapped back to Racing Bulls and giving erstwhile team-mate Yuki Tsunoda a salutatory wave as they passed each other in the revolving door.

But blaming the second driver for car performance issues was a strategy with very little juice left in the tank already, not least given how vocal Verstappen was about the RB21’s narrow set-up window and twitchy manners at the limit. His ability to live with that was keeping his drivers’ title hopes alive, but Red Bull could offer little challenge in the financially lucrative constructors’ championship with just one driver scoring.

Ultimately this would cost team principal Christian Horner his job as the Verstappen faction, now more powerful than ever, openly began briefing to the effect that Max would likely trigger break clauses in his contract if car performance didn’t improve.

Horner’s increasingly shrill accusations that McLaren’s performance advantage came from exotic technical subterfuge such as using water to cool the rear tyres, or so-called phase-change materials in the brake cowling, did the job of triggering scrutiny, but also communicated the level of desperation in the upper echelons of Red Bull’s management.

As F1 moved to its first Middle East leg, the trend continued of Norris looking scrappy, lacking in confidence and being prone to errors, Verstappen’s temperament being similarly brittle, and Piastri maximising his take with an Alain Prost-like absence of fuss. Norris toiled to sixth on the grid in Bahrain, four tenths off his polesitting team-mate, and behind even the laggardly Alpine piloted by Pierre Gasly.

Norris’s execution of the race was also lacking: he lined up outside his grid ‘box’ and the resultant penalty consigned him to battling for the final spot on the podium; plus he was caught napping by the Ferraris when the race restarted after a safety car deployment. Verstappen also had an off-weekend, while George Russell’s combative run to second place despite a major electrical glitch in his Mercedes gave further indication that he could have a hand in future championships, given the right machinery. 

Piastri’s Bahrain win was the first of three in a row

Photo by: Rudy Carezzevoli / Getty Images

“When you’re an athlete, when you’re a driver, whatever it is – you just know when things click, when you feel confident, when you feel comfortable,” Norris said. “I’m confident that I have everything I need and I’ve got what it takes. I have no doubt about that.

“But something’s just not clicking with me and the car. I’m not able to do any of the laps like I was doing last season. Then, I knew – every single corner – everything that was going to happen with the car, how it was going to happen. I felt on top of the car.

“This year, I could not have felt more opposite so far. Even in Australia, whether or not I won the race, I never felt comfortable, never felt confident. The car was just mega and that’s helping me get out of a lot of problems at the minute. But I’m just nowhere near the capability that I have – which hurts to say.”

As is the case in modern F1, though, debates over the rights and wrongs of the case divided along partisan lines in the wider fan community

Norris emphasised this point by crashing out of Q2 for the next race, on the Jeddah Corniche circuit. Whether or not Piastri maximised the potential of his car in qualifying, the point was rendered moot when the Australian made a great start from second place on the grid to relieve polesitting Verstappen of the lead into Turn 1.

Again, the pressured environment of Red Bull was on clear display as Verstappen refused to concede the position, taking to the run-off to remain ahead and obstinately refusing to give way. A five-second penalty therefore came in his direction, moving Horner to wave screen-grabs from Verstappen’s onboard camera under the noses of the media post-race.

All these did, though, was demonstrate that Piastri was indeed entitled to room at the first corner under the FIA’s driver guidelines, where the test is whether the overtaking car’s front axle is alongside the other’s mirrors at the apex. As is the case in modern F1, though, debates over the rights and wrongs of the case divided along partisan lines in the wider fan community.

Verstappen had a costly moment of madness with Russell in Spain

Photo by: Malcolm Griffiths / Formula 1 via Getty Images

But, if Horner thought he would be able to overturn penalties by triggering the bottom half of the internet to shout at the FIA on social media, the energy invested in creating the scene was wasted.

Nevertheless, the topic of the driver guidelines – whose wording was now in the public domain – and the consistency of their interpretation would evolve into a recurring theme throughout the year.

Piastri’s summer reign

In Saudi Arabia, Piastri took the lead of the drivers’ championship on merit. It was a lead he would not lose until early autumn, and then in peculiar circumstances.

McLaren passed a detailed FIA inspection of the MCL39’s rear end in Miami as the governing body investigated the claims of phase-change materials and associated witchcraft. Piastri won again there, lost to Verstappen at Imola in what was essentially a repeat of the circumstances in Japan (though this time due to a great Verstappen pass at the first corner, rather than a brilliant qualifying lap), then had a slightly anonymous weekend in Monaco while Norris won.

Piastri cemented his advantage with another peerless weekend performance in Spain: on pole by two tenths, he made an excellent start to lead the race in his typically unruffled fashion, and headed off an attempt by Red Bull to three-stop Verstappen back into contention. When this failed, Max had a peculiar meltdown in traffic and earned himself a penalty by colliding pointlessly with Russell. That cost Verstappen a crucial nine points. Norris, meanwhile, looked relatively ordinary.

For the Canadian GP, McLaren made available an alternative front suspension geometry, which aimed to confer the ‘feel’ for the limits of grip that Norris craved. Piastri chose not to avail himself of it, explaining that it brought some performance compromises he felt outweighed the benefits.

McLarens tangled in Montreal as Piastri appeared in control

Photo by: James Sutton / LAT Images via Getty Images

When Norris reflects on the 2025 season, he will rue the Montreal weekend as an opportunity lost to secure the championship earlier. Russell qualified on pole and won the race on a circuit where the majority of braking is done in a straight line, therefore masking an inherent shortcoming in the new rear suspension geometry recently introduced on his Mercedes. In Russell’s wake, while disputing fourth place, Norris clattered clumsily into Piastri trying to overtake on the main straight, ending his own chances of scoring points.

The chasing pack looked well in touch at this point, but Mercedes’ rear suspension upgrade proved to be a bothersome dead end, though the result in Canada sowed enough doubt that the team didn’t revert until the Hungarian GP nearly two months later. The opposite was the case for Norris, who was able to rediscover his mojo with McLaren’s alternative front end.

By the end of August, it looked like the champion would be one of the McLaren drivers, most likely Piastri, whose win from pole position at Zandvoort – while Norris retired with an engine issue – left him 34 points clear of his team-mate.

“That’s one of the things that makes me most proud. I feel like I’ve just managed to win it the way I wanted to win it” Lando Norris

Verstappen, 104 points behind, was now a fringe player – and, by his own admission, losing interest in the world championship fight.

The Red Bull renaissance

The catalyst for Verstappen’s remarkable comeback in the final phase of the season came in two connected elements: Laurent Mekies’s appointment as team principal in place of Horner, triggering a pivot to a more engineering-led approach; and the team discovering that McLaren’s advantage lay not in brake-materials subterfuge but a means of running the car at low ride heights in a way that the front skid plates were more critical than the rears.

A new floor on the RB21 at Monza in September, combined with a set-up approach led by Verstappen’s seat-of-the-pants feel, helped him to victory and the revival of his title ambitions.

New team boss and approach led to a Red Bull revival at Monza

Photo by: Alessio Morgese / NurPhoto via Getty Images

McLaren also managed to checkmate itself on strategy in Italy, forcing it to order its drivers to swap places to correct its own error. While the team publicly maintained its commitment to giving both drivers equal treatment and opportunity, the effect of this intervention, naturally, was to give credence to widespread beliefs that Norris was McLaren’s favoured son.

Once such beliefs take root they are difficult to dispel, no matter what the evidence to the contrary – Norris was only behind due to agreeing to allow Piastri to pit first to defend his position.

Piastri’s crashes in Azerbaijan, and his struggles in the low-grip environments of Austin, Mexico City, Las Vegas and a wet Interlagos, were explained by the team as a combination of mistakes and Oscar’s natural aversion to low-grip tracks, which require him to make “adaptations” (to quote McLaren boss Andrea Stella) to his natural style.

That was compelling enough, as was Piastri’s return to form at Qatar’s high-grip Losail speedbowl – but, by then, the damage had been done, in the championship standings as well as in the court of public opinion. Norris took the championship lead in Mexico and was never headed thereafter.

In the three-way championship finale, all the protagonists were the best versions of themselves: Verstappen, combative and quick as ever, won the battle but not the war. Piastri chased the victory he needed in his usual unruffled style. Norris, meanwhile, controlled it smartly and turned up the pace when required to secure the third place that would give him the title.

“That’s one of the things that makes me most proud,” said Norris afterwards. “I feel like I’ve just managed to win it the way I wanted to win it, which was not by being someone I’m not – like trying to be as aggressive as Max, or as forceful as all the champions might have been in the past, whatever it may be.”

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The top three took their title fight down to the wire

Photo by: Clive Rose / Getty Images