They may not be household names in motorsport, but former Ginetta Junior racers Jack Mitchell and James Kellett have the illustrious honor of being the only two drivers to have beaten Lando Norris in a full season campaign thus far in the meteoric 17 year-old’s career.
But for this black mark, Norris has taken the championship honours in every series he has entered: be it MSA Formula (now the F4 British championship), Formula Renault Eurocup, the Toyota Racing Series in New Zealand and now the European F3 crown. Even the prestigious McLaren Autosport BRDC Award could not be allowed to slip through the fingers of the perfectionist teen.
For a young man quickly inducted into McLaren’s young driver programme after winning the award, there was a certain sense of inevitability about the way Norris’ latest title triumph was covered in the national press: much talk of “walking in Lewis Hamilton’s foot-steps” and “emulating” McLaren’s former protege has long been preferential to any detailed discussion of Norris’ achievements. Nevertheless, there is something telling about the urge to wheel-out causal Hamilton symmetries: with Button breaking in his retirement slippers, the A-list cast of British motorsport is growing thin.
Similarly, despite the fact that drivers like James Calado, Sam Bird, Alex Lynn and Oliver Rowland have ensured no shortage of British single seater success, the expectant Silverstone crowds are still waiting on a new home hero. Hamilton’s bombshell arrival on the grid in 2007 is one of the most significant moments on F1’s historic tapestry, so the urge to see history repeated is fully understandable.
And yet, Lando is not walking in anyone’s “footsteps”, but rather seamlessly transitioning between series, diligently and unassumingly ticking-off the usual tenets of a young superstar. The two years spent with the stalwart TOCA package were an excellent platform for the 14 year-old CIK-FIA KF World Champion, the youngest ever world karting champion.
In Ginetta Juniors in 2014, a pair of podiums in just his second weekend in car-racing was a sign of things to come, albeit Lando would have to wait until mid-season to claim his first win. His natural affinity for single-seaters was clear as he moved into MSA Formula, taking a sensational win on debut en-route to a fairly emphatic title over rival Ricky Collard.
However an arguably more significant achievement in 2015 came with a victory in his debut weekend on the European stage in a experience-garnering cameo in ADAC F4 at Spa: Lando’s first encounter with the infamous circuit. To be on the pace of second season racers like the widely lauded Joel Eriksson in a first visit to one of the world’s greatest driver’s circuits was a preview of the demolition job Norris would do on his full-time debut in European racing.
In 2016, Lando would sweep to both Eurocup (becoming the first rookie since Stoffel Vandoorne to take the Eurocup crown) and NEC 2.0 titles, amassing some 11 wins and 16 pole positions in the process. A quite extraordinary third title of 2016 came in unfamiliar surroundings in the Toyota Racing Series in New Zealand. Successful tests with the reanimated Carlin F3 squad, and a pacey if ultimately disappointing F3 debut at Macau were all warning shots fired across the bow of the F3 paddock.
The opening salvos of his F3 campaign perhaps didn’t have quite the commanding flavour of fellow rookie champion Esteban Ocon, but he nonetheless scored a sublime victory from pole on debut in Silverstone; akin to the immediate successes Norris had scored in MSA Formula and Eurocup.
Results hampered by poor starts and a weekend of sub-par qualifying performances in Hungary saw something of a mid-seaon lull, but as with his ADAC F4 cameo, a visit to Spa clearly brought out the best in Lando, and his natural affinity for the circuit saw him take all three poles and score two victories.
Four victories from the next two rounds, including a wet weather winning margin of more than 17 seconds in the first race at the Nurburgring, put Norris is a dominant position in the standings. In claiming the crown at Hockenheim at the weekend, Norris became the first champion of the FIA F3 era not to drive for the Prema Powerteam juggernaut.
However arguably more important for the young Brit’s career was his landmark performance for McLaren in the post-race test in Hungary. His outing in the MCL32 was not his first experience of F1 machinery; that came as part of his McLaren Autosport BRDC Award which saw him test the 2011 McLaren MP4-26 at the Algarve circuit in Portugal.
However Norris’ Hungarian test was his first F1 outing under the weight of paddock scrutiny. A best lap of 1m17.385s, albeit on a softer compound of tyre, eclipsed Fernando Alonso’s best qualifying lap from the Grand Prix by two tenths. By any measure, Norris’ qualifying and race pace would have been competitive had he lined-up for McLaren at the Hungarian Grand Prix.
It is difficult to recall any single performance that catapulted a young driver so concretely into paddock consciousness as Norris managed in Hungary. Hamilton’s first official test may have made the cover of Autosport in September 2006, but Lewis was an older, more-experienced driver, having won the GP2 title that year and conducted previous private tests for McLaren. And yet, there is a similar sense of inevitability about Norris’ career trajectory; much as Hamilton spent the 2006 season as an F1 driver in-waiting, in the eyes many Lando may have already sealed his F1 destiny.
Certainly, there is a genuinely remarkable yet counter-intuitive quality to the way Norris’ speed and confidence actually improves as he navigates new hurdles in his career; be it a debut on the European scene in ADAC F4, pitted against a melting-pot of talent in European F3 or under the gaze of the McLaren grandees in Hungary.
Together with Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc, Norris has become part of a trio with a truly unprecedented disregard for their own inexperience. The learning-curves of all three are so steep they appear to all but guarantee illustrious grand prix careers.
This is a dangerous mentality: hyperbole is the practically-minded young driver’s worst enemy. It is also a disservice to somehow suggest Norris’ ascent has been unprecedented: if he does ultimately step into Alonso’s shoes at McLaren he would presumably be alongside a similarly prodigiously accredited McLaren junior. Stoffel Vandoorne may not have burst onto the scene with the same electricity as Lewis Hamilton, but in the later stages of 2017 the Belgian has proved just as stiff a challenge to Alonso as the Spaniard experienced in 2007.
The optics of Lando’s career thus far may give the illusion of seamless transition, but each and every step has been contingent on the teen’s ability to translate tools like simulators and overlay-data into on-track performance. As Norris reaches the uppermost rungs of the single seater ladder that process will only get all the more complex.
And yet, if there is such thing as determinism in motorsport, you would confidently say that the teenager who was on Fernando Alonso’s pace in his debut official test will make it to F1. Getting to F1 has been a lifelong goal for Norris, and Lando certainly has an uncanny habit of meeting his goals. Now that he has set his sights on a Formula 2 assault in 2018, the F2 paddock can consider itself warned.
