It seems kind of hard to believe that a year and a half ago, the majority, if not the entirety, of the Formula 1 fanbase was eager to see Lando Norris finally break through for his first win.
Norris had been with McLaren since 2019, and during his time there, he had gone from apprentice to top driver and been a key reason why the team were able to make strides toward the front of the grid, strides which resulted in them winning their first constructor championship since 1998 in 2024.
Yet now the 25-year-old Briton has become one of the most targeted, if not hated, drivers on the grid on a weekly basis.
Generally speaking, that's what happens when an athlete in any sport rises to the top. As the saying goes, you either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain.
The best example of that lately is probably Patrick Mahomes, whom everybody felt bad for when he lost the 2018 AFC Championship Game. Now that he's been to five of the last six Super Bowls, people love to hate him.
But Norris hasn't truly risen to the top yet. Yet he somehow finds himself facing far more scrutiny from fans than one might expect for even somebody who has.
The reality is it's not all his fault.
Sure, Norris has had his moments of arrogance and straight-up childish behavior, like flipping off a fan who asked when he was going to get his first win last year. He does let things get into his head more than most drivers, and it's fairly obvious when that's how he acts. If some random fan can do it, you better believe the other 19 drivers on the grid can as well, and we see it all the time.
The multiple shots he's taken at Lewis Hamilton over the years, such as pinning his legendary success strictly on the strength of the Mercedes or even unnecessarily attacking him in the Hungary cooldown room last year over an innocuous comment, are evidence of the mental weaknesses which Helmut Marko was ridiculously and completely unfairly criticized for pointing out.
And of course, Norris has underperformed in a rocketship McLaren, winning just two of 10 races so far this year, while teammate Oscar Piastri, the so-called "No. 2" driver at the Woking-based team, has five wins and has actually catapulted in front of Norris on the all-time wins list, despite having debuted four years later.
But it's not like the teammate disparity is like that which we've seen between Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas or Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez (or Liam Lawson or Yuki Tsunoda or literally anybody else in the second Red Bull).
Norris is only 22 points behind Piastri following his embarrassing wreck in Canada, and even Piastri has made mistakes this year, notably throwing away second with a spin in Australia.
When it comes to Norris, fans are simply fed up with the media coddling.
We began to see shades of this last year when Norris started contending for race wins against Verstappen. He could do no wrong. The blame was all on Verstappen when the reality was both could have done a better job to avoid the Austria collision, and pundits even tried to skirt around the rulebook by arguing that Norris' clear-cut COTA penatly should not have been called.
When Norris took pole in Brazil and Verstappen only started 17th, Sky Sports claimed that that was going to be his race to truly establish himself as a championship contender. Instead, Verstappen went from 17th to win (in the rain), and Norris finished sixth, leading to his infamous "it's just luck" comment, for which he eventually did apologize.
Yet as Verstappen came to the finish line, all David Croft could do was talk about his own past sins.
It fits the narrative that there is an overwhelming bias against Verstappen within the British media, a narrative that has been growing and growing since his 2021 world championship battle with Great Britain's own Lewis Hamilton.
Adrian Newey, a Briton himself, echoed this sentiment in an interview last year, and anybody with common sense and even a half-hearted notion of objectivity can see it on a weekly basis with some of the fake headlines and leading questions he's asked. It's why nobody trusts the media in 2025, and even he has become wise to it with some of his answers.
But with Norris, the fact that he gets the benefit of the doubt every single time, despite having not won or really come close to winning a title yet (compared to someone such as Hamilton), has begun to wear on fans.
When you have CEO Zak Brown making claims like we're now in the "Lando Norris era", comparing him to Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher, and Lewis Hamilton (but not Verstappen, ironically), yeah, that's going to generate a bigger reaction from the fanbase when he fails to perform at an incredibly high level, much less even an average one.
While we covered past incidents regarding Norris' immaturity, that's not the real reason for the hate. It's comments like these, which the media absolutely loves to amplify and use to prop him up, that are.
I think it goes without saying that Norris himself has greatly matured in the past year. The fact that he shouldered 100% of the blame and apologized to both Piastri and the team, even though Piastri's result was unaffected, says a lot. He has always been hard on himself, but this was a different side of Norris that shows he has grown from that standpoint.
But is that really a big story, given that everyone saw that, yes, the incident was completely on him? It would have been a much bigger story if he did try to place the blame elsewhere, quite frankly. But I'm sure some still would have taken his side like we saw last year.
And somehow, some way, there were those who even used that apology to Piastri to shade Verstappen. Norris caused an accident, responded to it like he should have, and Verstappen is the bad guy.
At some point over the past year or so, Formula 1 fans have gotten wise to the charade. And it's about time.
Is it unfortunate that Norris, who is indeed a lot more mature than some fans give him credit for, takes the brunt of the criticism for it?
In some ways, yes, but in other ways, he can end that phenomenon entirely by performing like he was supposed to perform when everybody had him pegged as the preseason world championship favorite.
Maybe then he will become the "villain" in a much more desirable way.
I don't think Norris, in equal equipment, is currently a top five driver in Formula 1. He is arguably the most mistake-prone driver actually deemed a "championship contender" in championship-winning machinery in recent history, given how often he has failed to capitalize on golden opportunities and perform at a high level in the biggest moments.
Sure, he's super quick. He matched Verstappen with eight poles last year, even after Verstappen started the year with seven in a row.
But he is still reckless at times, and he still makes mistakes under pressure (a lot). Despite that mid-to-late season advantage Norris had, Verstappen sealed his fourth straight title with three races left, and after finally getting his first win, Norris could only add two more from then until Verstappen clinched, even with the quickest car during that six-and-a-half-month stretch.
He's almost like the Jameis Winston of Formula 1. For those not familiar with NFL, Winston led the league with over 5,000 passing yards in 2019, but he also threw 30 interceptions, the most in more than 30 years at the time.
You love the upside, but you know the risks with which it comes. And that's literally where Norris is at right now; the risks are still incredibly massive, even if we all know that he does have the speed to win the world championship.
If he can put it all together and get it right for an extended period of time with some semblance of consistency, then perhaps he will have actually earned the benefit of the doubt that the media have been so eager to hand him. Because no matter how much praise he gets, that's the only way he can truly contend for this year's title. Is he up for it?