Still pals! McLaren team mates Norris and Piastri at Spa
Lando Norris says he was both “stupid” and “silly” not to let his McLaren team mate Oscar Piastri past earlier than he did during the Hungarian GP.
Having been given the earlier pit stop to help protect him from rivals Norris got ahead of leader Piastri, who had dominated the first part of the race.
However when asked by the team to switch the positions back Norris delayed the move and argued his case on the radio, until finally letting Piastri by in the closing laps.
Norris says he now accepts that he should have let the Australian by immediately – and had he done so potentially then had the chance to race him and legitimately earn a victory.
He also conceded that by creating a team orders controversy he had taken attention away from Piastri’s first win and a one-two for his team.
“Could it have been handled slightly differently from both a team side and from a personal side?,” Norris said at Spa on Thursday. “Yes, absolutely. And I think we would not be having this conversation now.
“Whether people on the outside think and kind of come up with their own stories of what happened, and what I would have done, and wouldn’t have done that kind of thing, I don’t mind about that.
“But it’s the things that I could have done, the fact that I kind of clouded over Oscar’s first race win in F1 is something I’ve not felt too proud about.
“The fact that we had a one-two, and that was barely a headline after the race, and nothing was really spoken about it from that side. Yeah, that’s the kind of bits I felt worse about.
“But apart from that, yeah, we discussed it, we’ve spoken about it. Both sides could have done things a little bit better, and a little bit differently. It’s not good that we had it, but it’s a good moment that we’ve had it, we’ve learned from it, and hopefully it’s done better next time.”
Asked by this writer what he would now do differently Norris had one simple answer.
“Just let him past straight away,” he said. “Such a stupid thing that I didn’t, because we’re free to race, and I could just let him pass and still try to overtake and to race.
“It sounds so simple now, but it’s not something that went through my head at the time. So, yeah, such a simple thing like that, I could have done, but I was just in a good rhythm, and things were going well at the time.
“So I questioned it a few times, questioned the team a few times, but I knew as soon as they boxed me ahead of him, or before him, that I was going to have to let him go. I was a bit silly, and didn’t think of letting him go earlier.”
Norris insists that he’s not too stressing too much about what happened.
“I don’t need to overthink it, overcomplicate it,” he said. “A couple of very simple things, I feel like it’s turned into a much bigger deal than it needs to be, and that kind of thing.
“It was always clear, I always knew that I had to let him go, but the longer I waited, just because it didn’t matter if I let him go straight away or at the end, necessarily, the longer I waited, the more people questioned whether I would have done it or not.
“I think that’s the main thing, and a lot of people think that I wouldn’t have done. But I knew I had to. That made no difference.
“But I don’t need to replay it. I just know that I should have let him past earlier, and I still could have had a chance to try and win the race myself, and that’s what I should have done.”
Asked if that was now the obvious choice he said: “If I thought of that at the time, 100%. But I didn’t think of that for whatever reason. I just probably wasn’t thinking of the right things at the time more than anything.
“As they basically said, let him past now, I let him past straight away. So it wasn’t never a fact of was I ignoring and not listening, all of these types of things. It was always clear what I wanted to do, I needed to do, but I just let it go on for a little bit too long.”
Adam Cooper F1 