Donald Trump, carrying his famous red cap, would be last man to believe he couldn’t make the Formula One Championship Great Again.
It was his first known visit to the world’s premier series and he was a guest of McLaren. He went in there and pumped his clenched fists and wished them luck before the 57 laps began. And tried to rub off a bit of his self-belief on his hosts.
The papaya man visiting the papaya team.
And, as if by magic, Lando Norris won his first race on a sunlit day in Miami. A little bit of luck came into it, for sure, in the shape of a safety car. But for Norris, 24-year-old racer from Glastonbury, Somerset, a whole heap of relief lifted from his slender shoulders, becoming the 21st British winner.
He carried with him the unwanted tag of 14 podiums without a victory, more than anyone else in history, and one sensed it weighed him down. He is more introspective than his bubbly, made-for-Netflix public demeanour suggests.
Lando Norris claimed his first victory in Formula One at the Miami Grand Prix
The British driver is congratulated by former president Donald Trump following his win
The McLaren driver kept his composure to best favorite Max Verstappen (left)
His big chance came on lap 28, almost the exact half-point of the race.
This was brought about by Haas’ Kevin Magnussen punting Williams’ Logan Sargeant into the wall. Sargeant, from up the road in Fort Lauderdale, was unlucky. Anyway, the cessation in racing allowed Norris a free stop. It gifted him the chance to hold on to hitherto deceptive ‘lead’, for he hadn’t yet stopped and everyone else had.
Nice one. But who was in the car directly behind him? No less than his best mate on the grid, Max Verstappen, the world champion, the machine who can’t be beaten (not unless his engine blows).
Privately, Norris rates Verstappen the best driver the sport has known. He believes he has every attribute to succeed at the top, so to have the Dutchman in a sizzling Red Bull in his rear-view mirror when the safety car pulled in was hardly akin to a quiet Sunday drive.
It must have put the wind right up him. Now all he had hoped for before and after his debut in Melbourne in 2021 – a spotty teenager who pulled at his finger joints nervously as he spoke – ran through his mind.
Could he keep his calm? The early evidence was ‘yes’. He was shod on younger rubber, obviously, but the same hard compounds. He immediately set a fastest lap and continued to edge ahead, while Verstappen was struggling. He made his complaints known over the radio. Thirteen laps to go and he had opened up a four second lead.
Norris is psrayed with champagne by Verstappen and Ferrari's Charles Leclerc (right)
With his victory in sunlit Miami, the 24-year-old became the 21st British F1 winner
It was perhaps written in the stars. Verstappen, usually as dominant as imaginable, had managed to run into a bollard early on.
The triple world champion veered off track at Turn 15 a third of the way and collected the red-and-white cone. But at this point you would be thinking that nothing – plastic, human or extra-terrestrial – could stop the Dutchman as he dominates all he comes up against routinely.
That Norris won was testament to his talents, and built on his impressive performance, perhaps his most rounded in China a fortnight ago, when he was runner-up.
All this Norris joy had seemed a distant fantasy in the early stages. Verstappen had sat on the lead, no problems at all, keeping McLaren’s Oscar Piastri at a distance behind him of three seconds in the searing Floridian heat. But Verstappen was not romping away, actually, a sign of what was to come.
I don’t know that you’d call this race swanky. It’s too brash for that. Which was a perfect place for the politician who may be elected the next leader of the free world while inside a prison cell.
On Monday the great new Norris fan will be in a New York courtroom fighting charges that he falsified documents to cover up hush money he gave to a former adult-film actress and a Playboy model. Yet Sunday he was the main attraction even amid the A-listers who came (and those who stayed away perhaps because of him).
With his race, Norris claimed McLaren's first victory in nearly three years
Verstappen, usually as dominant as imaginable, had managed to run into a bollard early on
Donald Trump has arrived at the Miami Grand Prix and was flanked by heavy security
In a surreal scene some two hours before lights out, his security men called for a channel to be made taking him from the central paddock building to the McLaren garage. Someone shouted: ‘Hope you win, Donald!’ He turned and said: ‘I have to.’
He went into the garage for 10 minutes or so. He spoke to the sport’s top brass, including Formula One chief executive Stefano Domenicali and FIA president Mohammed ben Sulayem. He was in the McLaren stable at the request of the team’s majority owners, the Bahrain sovereign wealth fund led by the Crown Prince of the kingdom, Salman.
The conversation over, Trump then went through the same routine through the throng. An OnlyFans model, whose skimpy attire left little to the imagination, took a selfie with the Republican candidate presumptive. He jutted his jaw and off he stalked followed by his security detail.
He had not entirely got his own way this week. A billionaire friend, Steven Witkoff, had tried to organise a fundraiser at the track. The idea was to charge attendees $250,000 to attend the function on a Paddock Club rooftop suite.
The organisers stamped that out.
But Trump watched from the same spot as Norris took the win, a massive 7.6 seconds from Verstappen, with Ferrari's Charles Leclerc third. Norris put both hands in the air in celebration after crossing the line.
Colleagues at McLaren, who felt they had to underline they are non-political in a statement after the Trump visit, were overwhelmed. They danced in the pit lane.
Trump gestured to his supporters in the crowd as he prepared to watch the racing begin
Trump speaks with McLaren CEO Zak Brown as he visits the McLaren garage before the race
Lewis Hamilton, a McLaren world champion back in the day, gave Norris a thumbs up from the cockpit.
Norris hollered a noise beyond description. ‘We did it, Will,’ he said to his engineer Will Joseph. Zak Brown, the McLaren chief executive who had entertained Trump in the garage, hugged everyone he could find.
‘I guess that’s how it’s done,’ chimed a clearly emotional Norris, dedicating the triumph to his grandmother. ‘I knew when I came in today it was a day of opportunities.’
Yes, he made himself great.