Rising British racer Lando Norris has joined McLaren-Honda's young driver programme ahead of the 2017 season.
Norris, 17, won the McLaren Autosport BRDC Award in 2016 as well as the Formula Renault 2.0 Eurocup and NEC titles, marking himself as one of motorsport's brightest young talents.
The Briton will move into the FIA European Formula 3 championship for 2017, and will now also link up with McLaren as part of its driver development programme, as confirmed by the team on Wednesday.
"I regard Lando as a fabulous prospect; he blew the doors off his rivals in not one but three highly competitive race series last year, then capped that by establishing himself as the clear winner of the McLaren Autosport BRDC Award," McLaren executive director Zak Brown said.
"It was an impressively mature performance, and we’ll be developing him this year as part of our simulator team, whereby he’ll be contributing directly and importantly to our Formula 1 campaign at the same time as honing and improving his technical feedback capabilities."
Norris joins GP2's Nobuharu Matsushita and recent GP3 racer Nyck de Vries on McLaren's junior books, with all three aiming to follow in the footsteps of Stoffel Vandoorne after his promotion into a Formula 1 seat with the team for 2017.
"I’m very excited by how fruitful the McLaren-Honda Young Driver Programme has been in bringing talented young drivers to the fore," McLaren racing director Eric Boullier said.
“It’s a grand testament to the success of our Programme that first Kevin [Magnussen] and now Stoffel [Vandoorne] have succeeded in their ambitions to become Grand Prix drivers. And, although the Programme is a relatively recent creation, in truth we’ve been nurturing and developing the careers of up-and-coming drivers for many decades.
“It’s our mission to equip the members of the McLaren-Honda Young Driver Programme with all the tools necessary to break through – because ours is a highly competitive world in which the difference between success and failure is mapped out in tiny nuances. It’s a hallmark of McLaren-Honda’s approach that we leave nothing to chance.”
