Lando Norris said he took no pride in winning Saturday’s sprint race at the Brazilian Grand Prix after McLaren ordered teammate Oscar Piastri to move out of the lead with two laps remaining.
McLaren made the call to swap its cars in order to maximise Norris’ chances in his title battle with Max Verstappen. After starting on pole position ahead of Norris, Piastri led the first 21 laps of the race before the pit wall ordered him to give the position up on lap 22 of 24.
“I’m not proud to win a race like I did today,” Norris said. “I work hard to go and do a better job in quali [for Sunday’s Grand Prix] later and put myself in a better position for the race.
“We want to avoid it as much as much as we can, but at the same time we sign up for this, we have to work together as a team. We get told what to do, we have a boss. We do the best we can to help each other out.”
It initially seemed like Norris expected the swap to happen earlier in the race, and on Lap 7 he radioed the team to say: “I’m not sure what I’m doing here mate. I thought we spoke about this.”
On Lap 16, Norris’ engineer told him a swap would happen on the final lap, but that plan was abandoned on Lap 22 after Nico Hulkenberg’s Haas stopped at the side of the track and it became clear a VSC would be deployed to recover it.
The swap was made successfully before the VSC — under which overtaking is prohibited — ensuring Norris scored eight points while Verstappen, who finished third pending an investigation, scored six points.
“We spoke through many different scenarios,” Norris said of McLaren’s prerace plans. “It was tough to do that much earlier because the guys behind were pretty close.
“I think there was one lap, but it’s always hard to suddenly kind of plan that and execute it. So I think we did the best job we could, we won, both cars up there.
“Of course the [Virtual] Safety Car put [us] under a little bit of threat and we were lucky we didn’t have to do it after. But there’s always those risks in the beginning of the race, middle of the race, end of the race. It’s not a straightforward thing ever. So, we planned it and we executed it well.”
