Lando Norris admits “I was silly” and “stupid” over McLaren team orders furore

Lando Norris has conceded he was wrong to delay McLaren’s team orders in Hungary before finally letting Oscar Piastri past.

Piastri’s first F1 win last weekend was overshadowed by the intra-team drama after race leader Norris ignored demands from his team for several laps.

Ahead of this weekend’s F1 Belgian Grand Prix, Norris has held his hands up.

Norris said at Spa, where Crash.net are in the paddock, that he should have “just let him past straight away”.

He added: “Such a stupid thing that I didn’t, because we’re free to race. I could have just let him past and still tried to overtake and to race him.

“Sounds so simple now, but it’s not something that went through my head at the time. 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. I questioned it at the time, questioned the team a few times.

“But I knew from 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 let him go earlier.”

Norris said: “Could it have been handled slightly differently from both a team side and a personal side? Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

“And I think we wouldn’t be having this conversation now in some ways. Whether people on the outside think and come up with their own stories of what happened, and what I would have done and wouldn’t have done... I don’t mind about that.

“The things that I could have done, the fact that I clouded over Oscar’s first race win in Formula 1 is something I’ve not felt too proud about.

“The fact we had a 1-2, and that was barely a headline after the race, the fact we had a 1-2 and nothing was really spoken about from that side. That’s the kind of thing I felt worse about.

“Apart from that, we discussed it, we’ve spoken about it, both sides could have done things a bit better and a little bit differently.”

'People think I wouldn't...'

Norris insisted he never planned to ignore the team order completely, and refuse to let Piastri past.

“I knew I had to let him go,” he said.

“The longer I waited, just because it didn’t matter if I let him go straightaway or at the end necessarily, the longer I waited, the more people would have questioned whether I’d have done it or not. That’s the main thing.

“A lot of people think that I wouldn’t have done. But I knew I had to. So that made no difference.

“I don’t need to replay it, I just know I should have let him past earlier, and I could have still had a chance to try and win the race myself. That’s what I should have done.”

He added: “As soon as they basically said ‘let him past now’, I let him past straightaway.

“It was never a fact of was I ignoring or not listening or these kinds of things. It was always clear what I wanted to do and needed to do. I just let it go on a little bit too long.”

Norris won't demand No 1 status

By not winning the Hungarian Grand Prix, on a bad weekend for Max Verstappen, Norris conceded points in the chase to the leader of the F1 championship.

But Norris insisted that it isn’t McLaren’s responsibility to throw the entire team’s weight behind him.

“No, because that had nothing to do with last week,” he said.

“I shouldn’t have led the race, that’s the end of it. I shouldn’t have been in the lead. Oscar got me off the line, he controlled it well. That was it.

“I shouldn’t have led the race, and people shouldn’t have then had the perception of ‘ah, the team are not biased towards Lando’.

“If Oscar was leading the whole race, there’s absolutely zero reason for them to ask him to suddenly let me past, if you’re thinking of it from a championship point of view.

“I don’t know when the point is of like, if I’m 10 points behind, 15 points behind, whatever. At what point then do you go ‘can you help out a bit more, can you do this or do that?’

“I don’t know when that point is, and that’s not my decision.

“But when Oscar’s led the whole race and controlled it well, and from a strategy side, they’ve boxed me first, just to be safe, that’s just given the perception of something completely different.

“It shouldn’t do. Internally, we know it doesn’t. Oscar deserved to win and he did, simple as that.”

McLaren do not name a No1 driver, a decision which became highlighted into the chaos at the Hungaroring.

Norris will not demand that the team recognise him as their priority, despite sitting second in the championship.

“No. I still need to earn it, go out there and drive quicker than everyone,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s changed anything. I don’t know why now is the point that we would have a bias of one over the other, we have never had the bias in the team, it might have looked like it from the outside and that happens a lot now, but…”