As Lando Norris stood on the first tee at Augusta National, he started to get the shakes.
It wasn’t the enormity of the occasion, playing on the hallowed course that hosts The Masters for the first time. Nor was it the pressure of nailing his drive.
“It was because of the night that had been, and not having slept, which was an experience in itself,” Norris, the reigning Formula 1 world champion, tells The Athletic.
The original plan had been for Norris to fly to Augusta on Sunday night straight after the Miami Grand Prix in May 2024, along with Zak Brown, his McLaren team CEO.
But plans changed when Norris snared his first F1 victory in Miami, and McLaren’s first for two and a half years. They partied through the night. Still, there was a tee time to make with Brown, who is friends with Augusta members. So Norris, hungover and sleepless, and with a recovery score of 1 per cent on his Whoop wristband, boarded a plane and made it to Augusta.
“It was surreal, because I’d just come off that (night),” he says, having worn a blazer and a tie in the Georgia heat. “It was so hot, man. It was hard to recollect everything.”
Despite his condition, teeing off at Augusta was a landmark moment in Norris’ golf journey. Just a few years before, he had barely picked up a club. In fact, he didn’t understand why people really liked the sport. For someone whose entire existence was competing at full speed, slowing down seemed alien. Even boring.
“I remember being that one guy watching real golf like, ‘What the hell is this?’” Norris, who is fifth in this year’s drivers’ championship after three races, says. “I was definitely firmly in that mindset, seeing it, especially because I was so in love with racing, fast pace. And then you’re watching that… I’m like, What is golf?!’”
Those words drew a laugh out of Norris, now an eight handicapper who spends much of his free time away from the race track on the course.
Much of the blame lies with Norris’s then-McLaren teammate, Carlos Sainz, from when they first started racing together in 2019.
Lando Norris, right, and Carlos Sainz playing golf at the Netflix Cup in Las Vegas in 2023 (David Becker/Getty Images for Netflix)
Both drivers were living near McLaren’s factory in Woking, which was near a Top Golf centre in the UK, as well as a club at West Byfleet that had a driving range. Sainz, a big golf fan, wanted to take Norris along.
“I couldn’t even hit the ball,” Norris says. “You see someone swing and miss, and it’s like, oh man… The energy just disappears! You just hear a whoosh!” He still has the videos on his phone of those first futile efforts.
But Norris kept going back to the driving range with his friends, and then joined Sainz and Brown for a Sky Sports shoot at Beaverbrook Golf Club in Surrey.
Although he couldn’t swing a club due to a rib injury, it gave him a first look at a proper golf course. His curiosity piqued, he returned to West Byfleet and a professional guided him through a few holes, slowly building up the basics of his game.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in March 2020 and put F1 on pause, Norris made use of the unexpected time alone and at home in Surrey to hone his golf, lockdown restrictions permitting.
“The only thing you could basically be allowed to do outside the house was to go and play golf,” he says. “It’s a one-man sport.” He would pop in his headphones and go for a round, or spend hours on the range, pinging balls until his hands were covered in blisters.
It wouldn’t stop when he got home. Norris put up a net in his back garden so he could practice there too through the various lockdowns. “The poor people who moved into the house after me…” Norris says. “The divots in the garden, f***ing just bits of grass and mud everywhere!”
And then the competitive hunger, like the one had spurred Norris through his racing career, started to set in. He traded the search for every last tenth of a second for extra yardage.
“Very early on, I got addicted to it,” he says. “I would go out every single day to try and practice. I went from not even understanding the game to understanding why people love it so much.”
As Norris’ game improved, the rare kind of opportunities afforded to someone of his profile started to roll in. He got the chance to play in pro-am tournaments, including one at Wentworth in 2022 alongside European Ryder Cup player Tyrrell Hatton.
It was a course he found “a lot less nerve-wracking” upon returning for a round with his friends without the fans watching.
When Netflix staged its own tournament before the Las Vegas Grand Prix in 2023, crossing over two of its most successful sports series “Drive to Survive” and “Full Swing,” Norris was paired with Rickie Fowler. Sainz and Justin Thomas won the tournament.
The first name that Norris brought up unprompted in the interview was Justin Rose, who is close to Brown and the McLaren group. “We’ve played golf together and he’s a good friend of McLaren,” he says, before backing “Rosey” to go one better than his second place in 2025 and win this year at Augusta. “It’s nice to see someone you know do well. I want to see him win. It would be a cool story.”
The addiction to golf had led Norris to the most famed point in the sport, preparing to tee off at Augusta. On top of his exhaustion, he felt daunted by the slight dogleg right, uphill climb with the bunker posing a threat on the right.
Lando Norris playing with European Ryder Cup star Matt Fitzpatrick at the BMW PGA Championship in September last year (Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)
For an elite athlete used to being among the best in his craft, it was a humbling experience.
“You’re like, ‘how do I hit it all the way over the top of that hill?’” Norris says. “You’ve got Rory (McIlroy), he bombs it over the tree. It puts things in perspective.” His first ball landed under the trees, but even as he punched it back out to the fairway, Norris was in awe.
“It was incredible, just to go and play it and witness it, from seeing it on TV to playing it and understanding it,” he says. “It’s high class. I felt very lucky.”
With his round completed — around 100, Norris thought, “but the score didn’t matter, it was about the experience” — there was at last a chance to rest in the accommodation at Augusta. A second round was scheduled for the following day.
In the space of 24 hours, he had realized two major life moments. And now he could sleep.
“The first night I slept (after winning my first race) was in Augusta,” Norris says. “I woke up from the deepest sleep of my life, and I was like, ‘I’m dreaming, I’m in Augusta!’ And it was the realization that I’d won my first race in F1, but I’m here in golf heaven!
“That day I could really take everything in a bit more. You play Amen Corner, or on the par-three. I think on my second day, I birdied the par-three.”
A birdie at Augusta? Norris faked nonchalance recalling the moment. “You know, Tiger (Woods) put it in the water, I birdied it,” he jokes. “All relative, mate. What I could have been, eh?”
Lando Norris teeing off on the 11th at the BMW PGA Championship at Wemtworth in September (Kate McShane/Getty Images)
Last year, Norris got the chance to play the course again, this time with Brown and Sainz — a far cry from their first outings together at West Byfleet — and they decided to play from the back tees, just to add to the challenge.
Norris is yet to make it to The Masters as a spectator, but planned to spend this week on a road trip with his friends playing golf before finding somewhere to tune in.
He ticked the Ryder Cup off his list in 2023 in Rome, an experience he felt bore some similarities to F1. Unlike the majority of golf tournaments, the Ryder Cup encapsulates competing individually and as part of a team, a feeling Norris knows well when fighting for drivers’ and teams’ championships.
Golf may scratch the competitive itch that drives Norris, yet it is his favorite form of escapism.
“It’s definitely a thing that takes my mind the most away from it, especially if I’m playing on my own,” Norris says. “In Monaco sometimes, I’ve done like 18 holes in an hour and a bit, flat out on the golf buggy, headphones in, music, relaxed, in my own little world, singing along. It’s easily the best thing.”
But golf is unforgiving, even to F1 world champions. “Just the other day I hit my best, which is 78,” Norris says proudly, before a pause. “I hit 104 the day after that, but just forget about that.”