A curve of glass, slicing through woodland outside Woking; on the last hot day of August, McLaren HQ is just about stretching awake from Formula 1’s summer break. Engineers dart through a warren of white-walled corridors, while housekeepers polish cars once driven by legends. Upstairs, launching himself onto a leather sofa, one of their heirs: 25-year-old Lando Norris, TikTok heart-throb and multiple Grand Prix champion – today, with bonus spectacular tan.
“All natural,” quips the Bristol-born driver, with a big, dimpled grin. He spent his holiday in his villa in southern Portugal – a much-needed fly-and-flop amid a dizzying two weeks spent hopping between the Netherlands, Spain, Saudi Arabia and Monaco, where he’s lived since 2021. “Back to reality,” he says. “But it’s great – this is the most excited I’ve ever been about any season.”
Once the goofy wunderkind of the grid, over the past two years Norris has joined champions Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen as one of F1’s leading men. This autumn he’s eyeing his first championship title, taking on his very own teammate, Oscar Piastri, in a battle for the top spot.
On paper: ferocious competitor. In person: disarmingly charming. Today he radiates a gentle, boyish energy: decked out in McLaren orange, nervously ruffling his curls between questions. At our Vogue shoot here a month prior, the mood was different. Perched atop an Ayrton Senna-driven car from the early ’90s, dressed for all intents as a latter-day James Dean, he flickered into full-blown movie star. “I didn’t really feel it. I felt very awkward,” he insists now. But on set you could see him shed nerves in real time, slipping into his own headspace and blocking out the huge crew – a young star used to carrying the weight of being watched.
It’s no wonder he’s good at it. Norris’s is a frenzy-inducing face. Almost 14 million fans follow him on Instagram and TikTok. Amelia Dimoldenberg still remembers the “sheer hysteria” after he appeared on her YouTube show, Chicken Shop Date, in 2024. “I haven’t experienced that level of passion for an athlete in any sport,” she says. “In person,” she adds, “he’s very sweet, instantly likeable – plus extremely punctual, which always wins points with me.”