The 16-time Grammy winner toured McLaren’s Woking headquarters with her teenage son, met Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, and gave fans one of the funniest celebrity clips of the summer.
WOKING, England — July 4, 2026. Adele doesn’t do many public outings these days. So when McLaren released video on July 3 showing her wandering the team’s Formula 1 headquarters ahead of this weekend’s British Grand Prix, it took the internet all of about ten minutes to turn it into a full-blown moment.
The visit, which McLaren teased with a short welcome clip before posting the full tour on YouTube, saw Adele get the kind of access most fans can only dream about. She brought along her teenage son, and the pair told the team they’re both “obsessed” with the sport a passion Adele has said started with her son’s love of karting and has since become something they bond over at home.
The tour hit all the highlights: Mission Control, the simulator rig in the Gaming Studio, and a stop in CEO Zak Brown’s office. Team Principal Andrea Stella walked her through what a race engineer actually does during a Grand Prix weekend, and Adele sitting at the mock pit wall floated her own version of the classic “box, box” radio call, joking she’d simply tell a driver to hurry up and get in. She later admitted McLaren had let her into a few corners of the building she wasn’t sure “everyone’s allowed to see.”
Naturally, the clips that spread fastest weren’t the official ones. In one widely shared video, Adele slips on a bulky orange headset in Mission Control and starts channeling early-2000s Britney Spears, complete with mic-adjusting and exaggerated pop-star faces, while staff nearby try not to laugh. In another, she tells Lando Norris she doesn’t “sing very often anymore” only to grab a microphone seconds later and launch into a spontaneous run at “…Baby One More Time.” Fans immediately clipped the contradiction, half joking, half genuinely hoping it’s a sign new music might be closer than she’s letting on.
The simulator segment was its own highlight reel. With Oscar Piastri coaching her through a lap, Adele’s reactions swung from wide-eyed panic to full-body laughter, and she described the cockpit as feeling “a bit like a coffin” once the visor came down. Piastri, for his part, kept a straight face throughout greeting her with a deadpan “hello” and replying that it’s his favorite song of hers, before posting his own Instagram recap simply captioned “Nailed it,” tagging Adele directly.
Brown, who welcomed Adele personally, later posted about the visit, noting her family’s now-regular 6 a.m. watch parties back in Los Angeles for European race starts. It’s the kind of detail that’s become common among a growing list of A-list names drawn to F1’s recent explosion in mainstream popularity, and it’s a good look for McLaren, which enters the Silverstone weekend as back-to-back Constructors’ Champions.
For Adele fans, though, the visit lands at an interesting moment. She wrapped her “Weekends with Adele” residency at Caesars Palace in November 2024 and told the crowd she planned to step away for a long stretch afterward, adding onstage that fans “will not see you for an incredibly long time.” Since then, appearances have been rare, and while there’s been persistent chatter some of it from Adele herself during later Vegas shows about a possible fifth album, nothing has been confirmed.
That’s part of why Wednesday’s clips hit so hard. It wasn’t a concert or an album announcement. It was just Adele, off duty, cracking jokes in a headset and getting scared in a race car a rare, unfiltered glimpse of her while the rest of the world waits to hear what she’s working on next.
