Lando Norris has described how he settled on the "inevitable choice" of Rene Rosin to lead his new LN4 Fusion junior racing team.
It was announced earlier this month that the 2025 F1 champion was to set up his own junior racing squad to initially compete in the Italian F4 Championship, FRECA and Formula 3.
The group has also acquired assets of AIX Racing, including its FIA F3 entry, and has lodged an application to join the FIA F2 grid.
The team principal of the squad will be Frenchman Rene Rosin, who, at the helm of the Prema squad creating a junior racing powerhouse before stepping down at the start of 2026 from the team his family founded.
Rosin has guided the likes of Charles Leclerc, Oscar Piastri, Mick Schumacher, Kimi Antonelli, and Oliver Bearman into F1 through his work at Prema, with Norris believing he was the obvious choice to lead his new team.
"A lot of the guys are people I've known for a long time, and I've known Rene for many years," Norris told media, including RacingNews365.
"Since I started to go into single-seaters, I've raced against Prema since F4 so back in 2015, and I know him personally reasonably well, and so do my team around me.
"We wanted to put together a group which is experienced and knows how to lead a team, and not just create one good team, whether that's in F2 or F3, but be able to put together a project and something long-term and know how to put people together.
"Over the last seven years, I've been able to experience what makes a good leader, a good team, and a lot of it starts with the person at the very top, and he is that person.
"He is a guy who loves what he does, which is winning and creating a successful team and bringing people together to maximise things, so he was the inevitable choice at the end of the day.
"I don't know if he was out of a job beforehand, but at the same time, he was available, and he was the guy we wanted, and he was the guy who was available."
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Rosin's impressive record
Under Rosin's guidance, especially in the mid-2010s and early 2020s, Prema was often regarded as the powerhouse team in the largely spec-junior racing categories.
The likes of Le Mans winner and WEC champion Kamui Kobayashi, Indy 500 winner Felix Rosenqvist and F1 race winners Esteban Ocon, Pierre Gasly, Leclerc, Piastri, and Antonelli passed through the team, with other F1 stars including Lance Stroll, Mick Schumacher, Zhou Guanyu and Bearman all driving for the squad.
Between 2016 and 2021, Prema won four of the six GP2/FIA F2 titles, with Gasly, Leclerc, Schumacher and Piastri all claiming the highest prize in junior motorsport.
For good measure, Prema also won FIA F3 in three successive years, with Robert Shwartzman, Piastri, and Dennis Hauger between 2019 and 2021.
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