Before Formula 1: The Making of Lando Norris

Before there was the McLaren race suit, there was a kart.

Before the Formula 3 championship, before Formula 2 and before the Formula 1 contract, there were seven years of racing through some of the most competitive karting categories in the world.

This is where the story really begins.

Not with a Formula 1 car.

Not with McLaren.

With a young boy who discovered that racing was something he wanted to do more than almost anything else.

Seven Years in a Kart

Norris spent roughly seven years racing karts, and by the time he was a teenager, the results were becoming difficult to ignore.

In 2012, he won the Formula Kart Stars Mini Max championship.

In 2013 came the CIK-FIA European Championship, WSK Euro Series and International Super Cup in the KF-Junior category.

Then came 2014.

Norris became CIK-FIA World Champion in the KF class.

He had effectively reached the top of international karting before most drivers his age had even begun seriously considering single-seaters. Formula 1 records his European title in 2013 and world title in 2014 as the foundation for what came next.

But the important part wasn’t simply the trophies.

It was the environment in which he earned them.

Norris later described karting as one of the best periods of his racing life. He was often at circuits from Wednesday through Sunday, leaving only a couple of days at home to catch up with schoolwork.

He wasn’t treating karting as something to do on weekends.

It had become his life.

And that commitment mattered.

Why Was He Chosen?

Talent alone doesn’t get a teenager into Formula 1.

There are hundreds of young drivers who are fast.

Far fewer demonstrate the combination of speed, consistency, technical understanding, adaptability and maturity that an F1 team is looking for.

Norris was beginning to show all of it.

His first serious move into cars came in 2015 with Carlin in MSA Formula — effectively British Formula 4.

He won the championship.

Then came 2016.

And this is where the progression became extraordinary.

He went to New Zealand and won the Toyota Racing Series.

He returned to Europe and won both the Formula Renault 2.0 Northern European Cup and Formula Renault 2.0 Eurocup.

Three championships in one season.

The numbers were becoming impossible for the major junior programmes to overlook.

But there was another reason McLaren was interested.

Norris wasn’t simply winning.

He was learning quickly.

When McLaren eventually explained why it had kept him within its development programme, Zak Brown described him as a driver who was fast, learned quickly and possessed a mature head on young shoulders.

That was the investment.

McLaren wasn’t buying a finished Formula 1 driver.

It was buying potential.

The McLaren Door Opens

In 2016, Norris was selected as a candidate for the McLaren Autosport BRDC Young Driver Award.

The award was designed to identify Britain’s most promising young racers and provide them with financial support, advice and opportunities to experience different forms of racing machinery.

There was a moment during the assessment that almost sounds like something from a movie.

Norris was only 16.

He was initially considered too young and too small to take part in one of the tests involving a Mercedes DTM car.

Eventually, he was allowed to have his run.

He impressed.

And McLaren kept watching.

By the beginning of 2017, Norris was a McLaren junior.

The first objective wasn’t Formula 1.

It was Formula 3.

Formula 3: The First Big Gamble

Norris stayed with Carlin for the 2017 European Formula 3 Championship.

It wasn’t necessarily the obvious choice.

Carlin had not been the dominant force in the category, and Norris himself later acknowledged that staying with the team was something of a gamble.

But there was a reason.

He already knew them.

They had worked together in Formula 4.

He trusted them.

And, as Norris later explained, that familiarity gave him confidence even though the team had to work hard to catch the leading opposition.

The gamble paid off.

Spectacularly.

Norris won the European Formula 3 Championship in his first attempt.

He finished the season with 20 podiums, nine victories and eight poles, securing the championship with races still remaining.

This wasn’t simply another junior title.

This was the point where Formula 1 teams could no longer regard Norris as merely an exciting young prospect.

He was becoming an investment opportunity.

And McLaren had already invested.

The First Formula 1 Test

The same year Norris was winning Formula 3, McLaren gave him his first taste of Formula 1 machinery.

August 2017.

Hungaroring.

McLaren MCL32.

For a teenager who had spent most of his life in karts and junior single-seaters, the scale of the machine was enormous.

Norris completed 91 laps during the test.

Only Sebastian Vettel was faster across the overall test.

Testing times have to be treated cautiously, but the important point was that McLaren was giving its young driver increasingly serious responsibilities.

The next step came quickly.

McLaren announced Norris as its official test and reserve driver for 2018.

He was only 17.

Eric Boullier, McLaren’s racing director at the time, made the team’s intentions remarkably clear:

“I hope that he will one day drive for McLaren – that’s why we took him on board.”

The pathway was now obvious.

F3 had been conquered.

F1 had been sampled.

Now there was one major examination left.

Formula 2.

Formula 2: Learning How to Lose

If F3 had demonstrated that Norris could win, F2 taught him something arguably more important.

He couldn’t always win.

Norris entered the 2018 Formula 2 championship with Carlin.

And, predictably, he started brilliantly.

Pole position.

Bahrain Feature Race victory.

It looked like another championship might be inevitable.

But F2 was different.

The competition was brutal, the margins were tiny and Norris struggled to maintain the same level of dominance he had enjoyed in previous categories.

He won only once.

George Russell, another British driver destined for Formula 1, ultimately took the championship.

Norris finished second.

For someone accustomed to winning championships, it was a new experience.

And Norris later admitted that this was perhaps exactly what he needed.

He described the season as teaching him that he couldn’t always win.

That lesson would become important in Formula 1.

Because Formula 1 is an unforgiving place for a driver who believes every weekend should end in victory.

Sometimes the car isn’t good enough.

Sometimes the strategy is wrong.

Sometimes your teammate is faster.

Sometimes the weather destroys your race.

Sometimes you finish second.

And sometimes you finish nowhere.

Norris was learning that before he even reached the sport’s biggest stage.

The Final Piece: Becoming an F1 Driver

While fighting for the F2 championship, Norris was already working for McLaren.

He was the team’s test and reserve driver.

He was spending time in the simulator.

He was testing Formula 1 machinery.

He attended Grands Prix.

He drove in FP1 sessions.

He was becoming familiar with the people who would eventually become his race engineers, mechanics and team leaders.

McLaren was effectively allowing him to grow inside the organisation.

And then came another audition.

The 2018 Daytona 24 Hours.

Norris shared a United Autosports car with Fernando Alonso and Phil Hanson.

The teenager impressed Alonso, particularly during a wet night stint in which he recovered roughly 30 seconds of a one-minute deficit to the leaders. Alonso described his speed as impressive.

Think about the progression.

Karting world champion.

British F4 champion.

Toyota Racing Series champion.

Formula Renault champion.

European Formula 3 champion.

Formula 2 runner-up.

McLaren test driver.

Endurance racer alongside a two-time Formula 1 World Champion.

And still, Norris had not started a Formula 1 Grand Prix.

But by now, the question wasn’t really if.

It was when.

The Call

McLaren eventually made it official.

For 2019, the teenager would become a Formula 1 driver.

Carlos Sainz would be his teammate.

The young driver who had spent his childhood chasing karting championships was finally going to race the machines he had watched on television.

The journey from karting to Formula 1 had taken years.

But there had been no shortcut.

Every category had served a purpose.

Karting taught him racecraft.

Formula 4 proved he could win in cars.

Formula Renault showed he could dominate internationally.

Formula 3 proved he could handle a major European championship.

Formula 2 taught him that winning was not guaranteed.

And McLaren gave him something even more valuable:

time.

They didn’t simply sign a teenager and throw him into a Grand Prix.

They watched him.

They tested him.

They put him in the simulator.

They gave him Formula 1 machinery.

They watched him work alongside experienced drivers.

They watched him lose.

They watched how he responded.

And eventually, they decided that the risk was worth taking.

The boy who had started in a kart had earned his place.

The apprentice was ready.

Formula 1 was next.