The McLaren driver’s maiden win in Miami underlined his world championship potential after a 19-year journey
Lando Norris’s debut Formula One victory in the Miami Grand Prix on Sunday may have taken an awfully long time for a driver with such prodigious talent but it is without doubt a win well-deserved, the culmination of a 19-year journey that was almost over before it had begun at the age of five when his parents got cold feet over his attempt to emulate Valentino Rossi.
Norris is respected and well-liked throughout the paddock, an endearing 24-year-old who hangs out to do the clear-up work with the team, and who his mechanics consider as “a friend as well as a driver”. That the victory could not have happened to a nicer bloke has been the rudimentary but accurate assessment.