Lando Norris receives special recognition in his hometown—including memories from his former teacher about the early days of the future world champion.
Formula 1 world champion Lando Norris now has a street named after him: The English town of Street, where Norris went to school, has named a road near a local shopping center “Lando Lane” and put up a sign with his name on it.
Chris Davis, the shopping center’s manager, explained the decision: “Lando is a local hero, and everyone is absolutely thrilled that he became world champion.”
“He spent his formative years here and started karting during that time – a path that ultimately led him to become the world’s best Formula 1 driver. Renaming our street ‘Lando Lane’ is our way of honoring this incredible achievement by one of the region’s most beloved sons.”
What his former teacher says about Norris
The population of the small town of 12,000 in southwestern England shares this assessment, led by Norris’ former teacher John Bishop, who taught Norris at Millfield School. “I’m really proud of him and what he’s achieved.
It’s a pretty incredible journey, and something like this only happens to very few people,“ Bishop said in an interview with ITV. Although he hasn’t seen Norris since his school days, he still remembers the ”little boy“ from back then, as he calls him. Norris was ”really nice, very sociable, and extremely polite” at the time, Bishop said.
“He had a good sense of humor and just enjoyed being one of the boys.”
But Norris was under pressure from an early age to balance school and motorsport, as Bishop knows: “The school environment was good for him. Because part of our job was to help him cope with it all.”
The role of motorsport during his school days
Bishop witnessed firsthand how Norris won the Karting World Championship as a teenager in 2014 and entered formula racing – only to return to school as normal after a race weekend, but with his head still on the racetrack.
“When he came back from a bad race weekend, you could tell because he was thinking about it, analyzing it, and dwelling on it,” Bishop explained. “That was probably one of his strengths as a person—that ability to analyze, to self-reflect, and to constantly look for ways to improve. That probably helped him reach the peak of his career.”
Norris had always paid attention to “the small details” in the past, Bishop said. “He was constantly learning from his experiences. He was able to manage his school life and his racing schedule, and he had very little free time. That requires a certain maturity in his approach. He really seemed to have both feet firmly on the ground.”