Lando Norris and Zak Brown are swapping the pit wall for a spotlight next month, taking over London’s Hammersmith Apollo for a one-night deep dive into McLaren’s title-clinching 2025 campaign.
Fresh from sealing the World Championship and opting to carry the number 1 into F1’s new rules era, Norris will sit down with his boss on Sunday 22 February for what’s being billed as a one-off, “world exclusive” live show. Expect the lot: the tightrope moments, the calls that swung Sundays, and a look at how a team that found its teeth in 2025 plans to keep biting when 2026 lands.
It’s familiar ground for Brown. The McLaren CEO sold out the Apollo in November with his “Seven Tenths of a Second” evening, part memoir, part motorsport masterclass. This time, he’ll have the World Champion alongside him — a different sort of victory lap, and a rare chance to hear both sides of the radio chatter from a season that reshaped McLaren’s trajectory.
The timing’s neat. The date falls just after 2026 pre-season running, with Norris and Oscar Piastri set to shake down McLaren’s new challenger before the big London sit-down. The 3,500-seat Apollo should suit the format: big enough to buzz, intimate enough for the candid stuff. McLaren’s been remarkably open over the last 12 months; don’t be surprised if you get a few proper war stories from inside the garage.
Norris, for his part, has been consistent about who he credits for the silverware. In the immediate afterglow of Abu Dhabi, he made a point of folding the spotlight back onto the people around him — family, friends, the team who kept the wheels on when the margins got thin. This evening is very much in that spirit: a celebration of the collective, told by the two people who lived it most intensely.
What should fans expect? Likely a season-long unpacking — the pressure points, the strategy gambles that looked brave on paper and braver in reality, and the quieter pivots that never meet the cameras but decide championships. Norris is at his best when he’s allowed to geek out on the craft; Brown tends to deliver the unvarnished boardroom view. Together, they’ve become one of the paddock’s more effective double acts: one part racecraft, one part dealmaking, stitched together by a rebuilt culture in Woking.
The subtext, of course, is 2026. A new car, new technical order, and that rare sight in modern F1: a number 1 on a McLaren. Norris wearing it into a regulation reset is a marker as much as a novelty. The event isn’t a launch, but it will inevitably nod toward how McLaren intends to protect what it built in 2025 while the rulebook shuffles the deck.
Tickets go on general sale at 10:00 on Friday 9 January, and given Brown’s previous sell-out at the venue — and the small matter of a first British World Champion since the last era turned — you won’t want to hang about.
McLaren’s return to the very top has always felt like a series of incremental steps rather than one grand leap. That’s what makes a night like this compelling. It’s not just the highlight reel; it’s the footnotes, the near-misses, the decisions you only truly understand once the trophy’s in the cabinet. And after 2025, McLaren finally has that view from the top again — with a number 1 to prove it.
