Lando Norris captured his first ever Formula 1 world championship in the final race of 2025 on Sunday, completing a comeback in a captivating and unpredictable season.
The 26-year-old McLaren racer finished ahead of rivals Max Verstappen of Red Bull and Oscar Piastri of McLaren in the standings after all three entered the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix with a chance of becoming the world champion.
Norris played the long game in the race, knowing he only needed a podium finish to clinch the trophy regardless of where his rivals finished. He kept his composure despite an early threat from the Ferrari of Charles Leclerc and a few close calls in wheel-to-wheel racing after pitting for fresh tires and coming out in traffic.
“It’s a long journey,” an emotional and jubilant Norris said in a postrace interview broadcast on F1TV, thanking his team and his family, with whom he celebrated. “It feels amazing. ... I’m just crazy happy.”
Norris finished the race third, behind Verstappen and Piastri.
“I felt calm until three corners to go,” Norris told reporters after the podium celebrations at the champion's press conference. “I started to shake a little bit. I got to think of all those incredible memories, very quickly, and I got see the team when I went over the line. And this is a moment that I’ll never forget.”
Entering the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, Norris held a 12-point lead over Verstappen and a 16-point lead over Piastri, with a maximum of 25 points awarded for victory. In the end, Norris finished 2 points ahead of Verstappen and 13 points ahead of Piastri.
Despite Verstappen’s victory in Abu Dhabi, Norris ended his four-year reign of world championships, making him the first British F1 champion since Lewis Hamilton in 2020. It is McLaren’s first drivers’ championship since 2008 — also won by Hamilton in a season-ending thriller — and the first since 1998 when the team won both the driver’s and constructors’ championships.
It came one year after Norris lost the championship to Verstappen — and boldly proclaimed after winning the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in 2024, “Next year is going to be my year.”
He made good on it — but it was anything but a straightforward season.
After a breakout season last year, which included his first ever victory in F1, Norris entered 2025 as the title favorite and won the opening race. But Piastri soon began to outshine him and took the championship lead, holding it for most of the season. In the final stretch, Piastri slumped while Norris went on a hot streak, and the British driver regained the championship lead in late October, never to relinquish it.
“I had a lot of tough moments in the beginning of the season. I had great moments,” he said. “It just shows that just consistency over a year is what helps achieve what we’ve achieved today.”
“Those tricky moments — you’ve got to learn from them,” he said. “There was those doubts I had at the beginning of the year, and I proved myself wrong.”
While Norris’ talent has never been in doubt, his consistency and mentality faced questions this season. At times, Norris appeared to be his own biggest adversary, making unforced errors that cost him points. He overcame those demons throughout the season by stepping back from social media and, as he put it after a dominant victory in Brazil last month, learning to “just ignore everyone that talks crap about you.”
Meanwhile, Verstappen looked down and out in the middle of the season, falling 104 points off the lead after the Dutch Grand Prix in August. But he fought his way back with a series of stellar performances and unforced errors by McLaren, most notably with a double-disqualification due to illegal plank wear in last month’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.
At the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, Verstappen qualified on pole position and held his lead at the start, moving over aggressively to cover off Norris, who started second and lost a position to Piastri on the opening lap. Norris settled down into third place and managed his tires as Piastri sought to attack Verstappen’s lead and put him under pressure.
Norris was the first of the title contenders to pit for fresh tires, on Lap 17, coming out into traffic and having to overtake a slew of cars that stayed out, giving him a few nervous moments.
Red Bull kept its second driver, Yuki Tsunoda, out to block Norris in order to help Verstappen. But the gambit failed and Norris breezed past as Tsunoda was slapped with a five-second time penalty for improper blocking tactics.
In a midrace interview that aired on the ESPN broadcast, McLaren CEO Zak Brown called it “a dangerous and unnecessary maneuver” by Tsunoda.
Toward the end, Verstappen grew inquisitive on team radio about whether Norris was facing a threat from Leclerc for his vital third place finish, which his race engineer told him was doubtful.
Yet the same internal dynamics at McLaren that nearly cost them the title proved to be an asset at the end as they kept Red Bull guessing with two different strategies, which Verstappen conceded was a problem.
“What complicated, also, a bit, was that Oscar was on a different strategy. So you never know, of course, when he then pits how much pace he has in hand to catch up," he told reporters.
Overall, Verstappen said he was content knowing that he maximized the race with a pole position and victory: “So there was really not much that I could have done different.”
“Massive roller coaster for us, of course, the first half” of the season, Verstappen told reporters. “Some nice moments but mainly tough moments. Some really tough races and feelings. But I’m also very proud of how we navigated that.”
After briefly chasing Piastri for second place in the final laps, Norris backed off and settled for third place, knowing it was enough to crown him world champion.
“Obviously I would have wished for a slightly different ending,” Piastri said after the race. “But I think this year I’ve learned a hell of a lot about myself as a race car driver, myself as a person.”
“There’s a little bit of disappointment, obviously, but I can be very, very proud of the season I’ve had,” he said, while calling Norris “a deserving champion.”
Looking beyond 2025, F1's regulations will reset and teams will have to build new cars from scratch, a shift expected to scramble the order. It’s far from certain that McLaren will have the fastest car next year. And in 2026, F1 will welcome an 11th team to the grid: the GM-backed Cadillac,
Norris said he still has room to grow as a driver.
“I need to understand what I can do better,” he said. “I feel like I did that this year and I’ve got to do that even more next year if I want to retain what we’ve been able to achieve this year.”
