Image source, PA Media
Image caption, Lando Norris became McLaren’s team leader in 2023, aged 23
Australian Grand Prix
Venue: Albert Park, Melbourne Dates: 14 March-16 March Race start: 04: 00 GMT on Sunday, 16 March
Coverage: Live radio commentary of practice and qualifying on BBC 5 Sports Extra, race live on BBC Radio 5 Live. Live text updates on the BBC Sport website and app
McLaren Formula 1 boss Zak Brown has guided Lando Norris’ career since 2015, and believed he was a future world champion “pretty much right away”.
This could be the year Norris proves him right.
McLaren ended last season as constructors’ champions and, barring unexpected surprises, Norris has the chance to build his flirtation with a title challenge against Red Bull’s Max Verstappen last year into a full-on onslaught in 2025.
Brown is far from the only one who has long felt Norris was destined for the very top.
Stephanie Carlin, who worked with Norris throughout the junior categories and is now McLaren’s F1 business operations director, also always believed he would make it.
“He was just phenomenally quick,” Carlin says, “and he was able to execute it really well. There’s been an underlying talent and speed and pace that’s existed from the first time he got in a car.”
‘Everyone tells me he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread’
Image source, Getty Images
Image caption, Lando Norris (centre) after winning a Formula 4 race at Spa in 2015
Brown has been backing Norris, 25, since long before either were at McLaren.
Until Norris reached F1, the money to fund his career came from his father Adam, who became a multi-millionaire through success as a pensions trader.
Norris, who has dual Belgian nationality through his mother Cisca, was educated at Millfield in Somerset, but as his career blossomed it became increasingly hard to find time to attend school, and there was a fair bit of home tutoring involved.
Every step Norris took on track, he was a winner, but when it came time to move up to motor racing for 2014 after winning European and world karting titles, Adam Norris and manager Mark Berryman did not have the necessary contacts.
They turned to Brown – then the boss of a sports marketing agency called JMI, and well known in F1 as a deal maker and sponsor finder.
Initially, Brown felt “this is not what I do”. But Norris’ team were persistent. Brown says: “I thought: ‘All right, everyone tells me he is the greatest thing since sliced bread, maybe I can help.'”
Brown set Norris up with a meeting with Ron Dennis, then boss of McLaren, and soon started helping him as he moved up through the ranks. “He just destroyed everybody in everything,” says Brown.
‘Welcome to Formula 1’
Image source, Getty Images
Image caption, Norris (right) poses alongside Zak Brown and Fernando Alonso at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in 2018. It was the Spaniard’s final race with McLaren with Norris replacing him the following year
By 2017, Brown was in charge of McLaren Racing, after Dennis was ousted by the other owners, and he began to lay out the steps for Norris to graduate to F1.
In January 2018, Brown paired 18-year-old Norris with then McLaren driver Fernando Alonso, a two-time F1 world champion, in the Daytona 24 Hours sportscar race in his
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