Damon Hill tips Lando Norris to make it a habit: “three or four” more titles after 2025 breakthrough
The first one’s the bear. Ask any world champion and they’ll tell you the same: once you’ve cracked it, the world stops feeling so heavy. Lando Norris did just that in 2025, edging Max Verstappen by two points in a season finale that went right to the wire, and in doing so became the 35th driver to be crowned Formula 1 World Champion.
Now, 1996 title winner Damon Hill thinks Norris has kicked the door down — and might not stop at one.
“He’s done it and there’s a lot of comfort that comes from that,” Hill said on the Stay on Track podcast. “He will be able to, to some degree, relax. It’s a question of the amount of avarice you have to win.”
Hill referenced Michael Schumacher’s compulsive run in the early 2000s as a guide to what can happen once the seal is broken. “I always thought when Michael won one, two, three, four, five championships, he’d had enough, but then he went on to win one or two more. Some people, it propels them to go on to win multiple championships. I definitely think Lando’s got more than one in him. I think he’s probably got three or four.”
There’s a reason the paddock took that comment seriously. Norris didn’t fluke his way to the 2025 crown; he managed pressure in a knife-edge finale and beat a driver who’s made a habit of making everyone else look ordinary. That kind of finish tends to harden a champion, and it leaves the rest of the field — and his own team — recalibrating how to beat him.
Because for all the focus on Verstappen, the most intriguing threat to Norris might be the guy in the next garage. Oscar Piastri spent most of 2025 looking exactly like a debut title winner-in-waiting, only to hit a late-season slide that cost him dearly. The margins were small, the frustration obvious.
“Oscar did not exactly underperform,” Hill suggested. “There were moments that he dropped out last year. He will go through the winter and think ‘Okay, what do I have to do to patch up those little holes in my performance?’ And he will find out how to stop that happening again.”
That’s the uncomfortable beauty of McLaren’s situation: it’s a dream pairing until it isn’t. Two young, sharp operators, both quick, both consistent, both now battle-hardened by a title run that involved not just team-mate tension but Verstappen piling on late-season pressure. The lessons from that experience are priceless; the inter-team truce, less so. Piastri will have returned with a longer list and a shorter fuse.
“Of course, they’ve both been through a title fight between themselves, and then Max, of course, at the end, putting pressure on them, and they will have learned massively from that,” Hill added. “So there’ll be a strong pairing, but there will be more determination within the team from Oscar to stop Lando beating him again.”
That internal dynamic could define the next chapter. If McLaren give both drivers a car with even the same ballpark of performance they enjoyed last season, the risk-reward equation becomes brutal. Do you back the champion’s authority or lean into the push from the hunter? Do you loosen the reins and let them fight, or control the temperature and bank points? McLaren walked that tightrope well enough in 2025 to deliver a title, but keeping two apex predators pointed at the same target isn’t a set-and-forget policy.
As for Norris, Hill’s point about relaxation isn’t about taking it easy. It’s about freeing up mental bandwidth. Champions who’ve just been crowned tend to waste fewer laps on second-guessing and spend more of them executing. That’s the difference between defending a lead and building one.
Whether that translates into the “three or four” Hill predicts depends on ingredients that are always bigger than the driver: car, development pace, strategy calls under fire. But after a season that ended with Norris holding his nerve and holding the trophy, it’s hard to argue with the premise. He’s past the hardest part. Now we get to see what he does with the road ahead — and how closely an ambitious team-mate in papaya plans to follow.
