Britain’s Lando Norris has secured the Formula One drivers’ championship after finishing third at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, pending the finalisation of results and any potential post-race reviews similar to the incident that led to his disqualification in Las Vegas two weeks ago.
The 26-year-old Briton ended the season on 423 points, edging out Max Verstappen, the Abu Dhabi race winner, who finished on 421 points. Norris’s McLaren teammate, Oscar Piastri, claimed third place overall with 410 points.
Norris opened the season with a victory in Australia and led the championship after the next three rounds. However, Piastri won three consecutive races, taking the lead in Saudi Arabia and consolidating it in Mexico, maintaining his advantage over Verstappen by 104 points for 14 grands prix. Despite Norris’s wins in Monaco, Austria, Britain and Hungary, a race-ending oil leak at the Dutch Grand Prix on 31 August left him 24 points behind Piastri.
In the following six races, Norris outperformed Piastri, briefly overtaking him in Mexico and extending the lead to 24 points with victories in both the sprint and grand prix in Brazil. McLaren’s double disqualification in Las Vegas disrupted this momentum, allowing Verstappen to close the gap. Although Norris slipped to third and fourth in Qatar’s sprint and grand prix respectively, he retained a 12-point lead heading to Abu Dhabi. Key points gained in the closing laps in Qatar meant that a third-place finish in Abu Dhabi was sufficient to secure the title.
Norris becomes the 11th British driver to win the F1 world championship and ends Verstappen’s four-year reign, which began in 2021 after dethroning Lewis Hamilton, the last British champion.
