‘Like a movie’: Lando Norris relives final lap to glory and partying till 6am as world champion
F1’s new superstar shares memories from road to glory Briton tells of ‘cool flashbacks’ on track in Abu DhabiAfter becoming Formula One world champion for the first time, Lando Norris revealed that he had enjoyed the final moments of the Abu Dhabi grand prix on Sunday by considering all the moments that had brought him to the pinnacle of the sport,Norris was speaking the day after he won the world championship by taking third place at the Yas Marina circuit,His title rival Max Verstappen won the race but fell short of Norris by just two points,The fight remained tight to the decisive last round with Norris’s McLaren teammate, Oscar Piastri, who had led the championship for a large part of the season, also in the mix for the final race but who ultimately finished third,“It was like a movie,” the 26-year-old said.
“As much as I was trying to avoid every bump possible I was also remembering all of those moments from the very beginning, driving a go-kart for the first time ever, my first time on the track in a go-kart, the races I had, the karting world championship I won in 2014 and many different memories.“I was watching me.I was living it but I was also watching me drive around from a bird’s-eye view and this was all within the space of a couple of minutes, through to the last seven years of McLaren and the good and bad moments of the season.”Norris also revealed he had partied until 6am with his friends at the W hotel that overlooks the Yas Marina circuit and ended the night at a McDonald’s.“I had a sausage McMuffin.
Was it the breakfast of champions? Certainly not, I regretted it straightaway.”The Briton had to hold his nerve to see out a tense fight in Abu Dhabi and pull off some bold overtakes to ensure he claimed the third place he needed but said that at the close he was unsure how he would feel when he finally took the championship he had dreamed of winning since he was a child.“I had no idea what to expect,” he said.“With three laps to go I was like: ‘I am getting pretty close and I’m not feeling anything yet.’ I was like: ‘Is this going to mean a lot to me?’“Then the next lap I started having these cool flashbacks.
It was like a montage of my life and going under the bridge for the final time and imagining my mum in the garage and that made me emotional,“The best memory was when I came round the final corner and this is now from my view from my eyes inside my visor and seeing the chequered flag and that moment of lifting off and being able to cry,I want to savour that moment because that was the ‘it’ moment,”As the 11th British driver to win the world championship he stands in illustrious company but was insistent the new-found fame, and all that is associated with it, would not change him,“From the exterior it will change my life but it won’t change me and how I live it.
I really hope it doesn’t anyway.I don’t want to be that kind of person,” he said.Norris was involved in a battle with Verstappen for the title last season, albeit coming from well behind the Dutchman and the McLaren team principal, Andrea Stella, believed this was one of the two key areas he had identified that had enabled Norris to close out his first title.Sign up to Sport in FocusOur picture editors select their favourite sporting images from the past week, from the spectacular to the powerful, and with a little bit of fun thrown inafter newsletter promotion“Definitely, there was a lot that was taken away from the quest last year, even if it didn’t go to the last race,” he said.“There were some learning points, like Austria, it was a tough one.
[But] I think Lando elevated his sense of status, like: ‘I can compete with Max.’”Norris also struggled with the car for the opening half of this season, not having the feel for the front grip he prefers and it particularly cost him in qualifying.It was a period when Piastri took the lead of the championship with a series of enormously assured drives.The team were ultimately able to bring developments to the car around the front suspension such that Norris felt much more comfortable and Stella maintained that the way he had handled the difficult period was key.“This season there was another important turning point in my view, which is the way Lando responded to the difficulties we had at the start of the season,” he said.
“It was the start of a process which was structured, holistic, it involved personal development, professional driving, racecraft.“It makes me particularly glad that Lando could capitalise on this, because this has been something that I’ve not necessarily seen many times before in terms of the amount of work, the people involved, and the rate of development.”
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A divided Federal Reserve meets this week to decide whether to cut interest rates, the US central bank’s last meeting before the end of a tumultuous year.The US central bank faces a number of unique challenges as it weighs its latest interest-rate decision.After the six-week government shutdown briefly shuttered the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the federal agency that collects economic data on prices and employment, Fed officials have less data to make their decision.Making matters more complicated is what appears to be growing internal division among the committee’s voting members, who are split on whether there should be a third rate cut before the end of the year. Rates currently sit at a range of 3
Anglo American drops plan to pay bosses millions in bonuses after $50bn Teck merger backlash
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‘We’ll never be able to rebuild’: despair of ex-Vodafone franchisees and pressures on their mental health
Experiences raise questions about how telecoms firm treated small business owners, whose commission it cutWhen Adrian Howe drowned in August 2018, his family found some solace in the support of his longtime employer.The bond between the 58-year-old and Vodafone – the multinational mobile phone group for which Howe had worked for 20 years – was so tight that his funeral featured a wreath shaped like the company’s speech mark brand.Meanwhile, his widow was paid the equivalent of a death-in-service benefit, even though Howe had left the company weeks earlier. “I was reassured that Dad would be ‘reinstated’ back into Vodafone as if he had never actually left,” recalls daughter Kirsty-Anne Holmes. “He had [left] in order to open [Vodafone] stores as a franchise
Extracting hangovers from beer: inside Budweiser owner’s ‘nolo’ brewery in south Wales
A “de-alcoholisation facility” sounds like somewhere to check in after a boozy Christmas, but in the new annexe of a brewery in south Wales they are extracting hangovers from beer.With demand for no-alcohol and low-alcohol (“nolo”) beer taking off in the UK, the hi-tech brewing apparatus enables the plant at Magor, which produces more than 1bn pints of Budweiser, Corona and Stella Artois a year, to make the increasingly popular teetotal versions too.The new unit is part of AB InBev’s global brewing empire and at its official opening on Friday, Brian Perkins, whose wider management responsibilities include running the drinks group’s UK arm, acknowledged that in the early days alcohol-free beer tasted “lousy”.Alcohol gives beer a sweet, warming, full-bodied taste, as well as affecting how other flavour compounds evaporate, resulting in its distinctive flavour. So removing it and being left with a drink that still tastes good has been a huge challenge for the industry
‘Zombie’ electricity projects in Britain face axe to ease quicker grid connections
Britain’s energy system operator is pulling the plug on hundreds of electricity generation projects to clear a huge backlog that is stopping “shovel-ready” schemes from connecting to the power grid.Developers will be told on Monday whether their plans will be dismissed by the National Energy System Operator (Neso) – or whether they will be prioritised to connect by either the end of the decade or 2035.More than half of the energy projects in the queue will be removed to make way for about £40bn-worth of schemes considered the most likely to help meet the government’s goal to build a virtually zero-carbon power system by 2030.The milestone marks the end of a two-year process to clear the gridlock of laggard “zombie” projects awaiting connection that meant many workable proposals were facing a 15-year wait to plug into Britain’s transmission lines.Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, said: “We inherited a broken system where zombie projects were allowed to hold up grid connections for viable projects that will bring investment, jobs and economic growth
Keir Starmer to make Iceland boss Richard Walker a Labour peer
The formerly Conservative-supporting boss of the supermarket Iceland is to be made a Labour peer when the party appoints another 25 representatives to parliament’s upper house later this month.Keir Starmer will appoint Richard Walker to the House of Lords, the Guardian understands, the culmination of an unusual and rapid political transformation for someone named as a prospective Tory MP candidate a little over three years ago.It was only February this year when Iceland’s executive chair was rating Starmer’s government six out of 10, saying that Labour needed to focus on “inclusive growth and everyday growth” that could “trickle down in everyday people’s lives”.As a Labour peer, Walker will get the chance to push for policies close to his heart including closer relations with the EU and also for a more positive message on the economy.He took over the leadership of Iceland in 2023 after his father, Malcolm Walker, stepped down from the frozen foods chain he had founded in 1973
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‘Like a movie’: Lando Norris relives final lap to glory and partying till 6am as world champion
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