Lando Norris won his first Formula 1 drivers’ championship by securing the third place he needed in the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
The 26-year-old took the title by two points from Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, who won the race to take his eighth victory of the year, one more than the Briton and his McLaren team-mate Oscar Piastri.
McLaren were always in control of a race packed with tension even though Verstappen was on course for victory from the first lap, because Piastri finished second and was in a position to help Norris if needed.
Norris becomes the 11th British F1 world champion at the end of his seventh season in F1, a year that he started slowly but in which he came on strong in the second half of the year.
And it is McLaren’s first drivers’ and constructors’ title double since 1998. The nerviest moment for Norris came after his first pit stop, when he came up behind Tsunoda in a battle for third place.
Red Bull had started the Japanese driver on hard tyres for the express purpose of trying to affect the race of Verstappen’s rival, in the way his predecessor Sergio Perez had with Lewis Hamilton in the controversial decider here in 2021.
Red Bull made it clear that he “knew what to do” after being told to do everything he could to hold up Norris.
He weaved down the straight on lap 23, but Norris committed for the inside, and kept this foot hard down even as he was edged slightly off track.
The incident was put under investigation by the stewards and the question was whether Norris would receive a penalty for overtaking off the track.
The stewards took no further action on that charge, but did penalise Tsunoda for making too many moves in defence.
From then on, Norris had only to hope his car kept going to the end, which it did, as he sealed an achievement that crowned his career, that he said on Thursday he had been working for for 16 years, and to underline a superb season for McLaren.
It is the first drivers’ championship won by the team since Lewis Hamilton’s first title in 2008.
