Lando Norris isn’t like most teenagers. Ask him a question and you’ll receive a thought-out, considered answer, delivered with an eloquence that belies his age – until you get the 19-year-old onto the right topic, that is. Ask him to recall the first time he drove a Formula 1 car and his eyes light up with glee.  “It’s mind-blowing,” he says. “You see it on TV, but it always looks so easy. People just do not realise how hard it is, how quickly things come at you. You just don’t feel like you’ll stop accelerating, you’re going ‘woooah, this doesn’t stop’. Then suddenly you have this massive brake, and the car stops suddenly. Your mind has to take a second to keep up with what’s just happened, then you turn, accelerate and it all happens again. It’s quite insane.”  Norris, of course, isn’t like most teenagers. Most teenagers can only dream of driving an F1 car. Norris gets to race one – for the storied McLaren team. When he started the Australian Grand Prix, Norris became the fourth-youngest driver to take part in an F1 race and the youngest-ever Brit, breaking the record set by the then-20-year-old Jenson Button in 2000.  Not that Somerset-born Norris is bothered by that bit of British F1 history. “It’s not something I’ve tended to think about, it’s just something that comes with it,” he says, with a nonchalant shrug that suggests racing in F1 at the age of 19 is barely noteworthy. “It’s an achievement, and I’ve got to be proud of it. But my aim is not to be the youngest British F1 driver: it’s to win races and championships.”  Still, Norris admits his rapid rise is a touch surreal. “It’s not long ago I was getting up at stupid o’clock to watch the Australian Grand Prix, thinking ‘one day I want to do that’,” he says. “Then you think how far away it is – and suddenly, I’m here. At the same time, I think of it gradually. I’ve taken my time to go through karting and the junior categories.”  ‘Gradually’ is a relative concept here. Norris started karting in 2008, with his career culminating when he won the world championship in 2014. That year he also made his car-racing debut in the Ginetta Junior series.  Norris switched to single-seaters in 2015, racing in MSA Formula (now Formula 4). He won the title.  The following year he raced in two pan-European Formula Renault 2.0 championships and the New Zealand-based Toyota Racing Series. He won all three titles.  In 2017 Norris stepped up to the Formula 3 European Championship. He won that title too.  Last season, Norris jumped into Formula 2. He won his first race but finished second to fellow grand prix rookie George Russell in the final standings. That one still rankles a bit.  “It didn’t quite go as well as I wanted it to,” says Norris, with a pained look that suggests he’d spent the year toiling deep in the pack rather than finishing as runner-up in F1’s top feeder category against a field of grand prix aspirants.  “I’m annoyed, because I’d loved to have won it, and have it on my record. But I’ve got to realise I made mistakes that cost a win, or a podium, or a bunch of points. But I know the areas I made mistakes in, and I’ve got to make sure they don’t happen again. I still enjoyed it, and that’s the main thing.”  The fact Norris found himself so high up the single-seater ladder before encountering some adversity – a relative term, in this instance – is incredible. Norris insists there’s no secret. “I’ve always been able to have good people around me who have put me in the right direction and with the right team,” he says. “I’ve been fortunate to do quite a bit of testing as well: even if I haven’t been able to test in the car we wanted to race in the next year, I’ve been able to drive something similar.”  It’s worth acknowledging that Norris’s ability to race with some of the best teams – including junior single-seater powerhouses Carlin and Josef Kaufmann Racing – and conduct plentiful testing is aided by family wealth. But while you can find many well-funded drivers plying their trade on F1’s nursery slopes, you won’t find many with Norris’s stellar track record. These days, most junior categories have restrictive regulations that help ensure a level playing field. You don’t win as much as Norris has without incredible natural talent.  It was that natural talent that brought Norris to the attention of McLaren, who signed him as a junior driver in February 2017.  That deal, he says, was the first time he really began to believe he could reach F1. “I never knew,” he says. “Even in F2, I never went ‘I’ve got this, 100%, I can do this’. You always have a bit of doubt. But the biggest thing was joining McLaren, and my first test in Hungary.” Which brings us back to where we started, in August 2017, when a then-17-year-old Norris had his first McLaren outing at the Hungaroring.  Norris says the step from F2 to F1 was “massive, the biggest between any category by far”. It’s one he handled well, though: he ended up second-quickest
Origin: How Lando Norris became Britain’s youngest-ever F1 star