For the boy in the luminous bucket hat, an achievement straight from the bucket list. This may not have been an afternoon of high sporting cinema, even if the presence of Brad Pitt and his phalanx of film crew members ramped up the glamour, but Lando Norris had the ending he wanted. Second place, with a stylish drive to boot, was some way to reaffirm his place in the Silverstone crowd’s affections and heighten the sense that he is almost ready to be this venue’s darling for the next decade or more. The wins will surely follow; this time, a revelatory weekend’s work from Norris and a buoyant McLaren did not feel too far short.
In the context of what, for the rest of this season at least, is inevitable domination from Max Verstappen this was a wider triumph for British racing too. Two local drivers had not stood together on the podium since 1999, when David Coulthard and Eddie Irvine formed a one-two. Norris was joined by his idol, Lewis Hamilton: a tantalising battle between the pair around lap 40 briefly offered the kind of neck-and-neck tussle, not to mention narrative, for which record numbers had flocked expectantly to the circuit since Thursday. Netflix may have cornered the market for soap opera, but Silverstone can still deliver the racing.
This has always been a big‑ticket affair and it felt yet more so here. It will take more than one year like this, short of headline twists and turns in its opening 10 races, to remove the sheen Formula One has acquired in the Drive to Survive era. Pep Guardiola and Thomas Frank roamed the paddock beforehand, perhaps in search of new strategies for a Premier League pre-season; Shakira looked on from the side while Sam Ryder, who had performed the national anthem here in 2022, swooned upon entering the garage set aside for part of Pitt’s film set.
The presence of Pitt, who sat in on the Friday drivers’ briefing, was perhaps what raised proceedings above the ordinary. Not the fact of his celebrity: more the sight of the fictional APX team, for which he will play a driver in an as yet unnamed F1-themed film, occupying a spot in the pit lane between the garages of Mercedes and Ferrari. To the untrained eye there must have been little difference between the work going on in all three. As the crews dispersed before the formation lap, a crowd of filming personnel followed Pitt, suited up, making his way to the back of the grid. That was where the meeting of fantasy and reality ended but the scene was remarkable for being so frictionless.
It is the kind of blend that must set Liberty Media licking its lips. Moments after Pitt’s departure Norris offered a swift reminder of the sport’s capacity to write its own scripts, overtaking Verstappen at the start, and even if the natural order was restored quickly enough it felt like the 23-year-old’s day. There was a fine drive too from his teammate, Oscar Piastri, who could not hold off Hamilton for third place but nonetheless confirmed the effectiveness of the upgrade overseen by Andrea Stella, the team principal. Stella, introduced by a beaming Zak Brown an hour after the race, has made a rapid impact since starting work in December and admitted to being pleasantly surprised at the day’s endeavours.
While the grandstands in Austria a week previously had been notable for the banks of Dutch orange in support of Verstappen, this time the slightly more papaya hue of McLaren stood out on a day whose skies never quite settled on blue or grey. It spoke volumes for Norris, an amenable and sunny character about whom it is impossible to find a harsh word, that an institution largely down on its luck over the past decade felt at least as well represented as the Mercedes and Hamilton in the home faithful’s hearts.
Norris became the first McLaren driver on Silverstone’s podium since Hamilton’s departure in 2012 and spoke touchingly of his colleague. “It’s genuinely what made me want to become a racing driver today,” he said of watching Hamilton and Fernando Alonso battle their rivals, and each other, in the late 2000s. “I guess little did I know that Lewis would still be here 15 years later and still going strong.”
Hamilton’s enduring presence, underscored by an excellent surge from seventh that raised Mercedes’s previously dampened spirits, means nobody can speak quite yet of generational shifts or handovers from master to apprentice. A 14th podium here reiterated that this is Hamilton’s home; the place where he has made hundreds of thousands delirious with some of the most devastating driving of this century.
Stella emphasised afterwards that McLaren are, according to his schedule, two seasons away from competing for regular wins. Norris is yet to cement his own legend but the sense was that he has, at least, opened a new chapter.
