Lando Norris admitted he considered disobeying the team orders to surrender the lead of the Hungarian Grand Prix, to allow his McLaren teammate, Oscar Piastri, to take victory, describing his thought process in the closing stages as he engaged in a tense standoff with his team as “pretty crazy”.
Norris had been told by McLaren to hand back the lead he had gained through a pit-stop strategy decision from Piastri, who had led almost the entire race. However, for the final 17 laps Norris vehemently resisted the repeated and increasingly frenetic calls to concede the position, before finally doing so reluctantly with three laps to go.
The British driver acknowledged that it had been enormously hard to obey the team orders. “Things are always going to go through your mind because, you know, you’ve got to be selfish in this sport at times,” he said. “You’ve got to think of yourself. That’s priority No 1, think of yourself. I’m also a team player, so my mind was going pretty crazy at the time.”
The 24-year-old, who is second in the world championship to Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and realistically his only challenger this season, had also seriously envisaged ignoring the entreaties of his team as he considered the title fight.
“When you’re thinking of the seven or six points that I give away, then … it crosses your mind. So it was not easy,” he said. “It’s hard when you’re in that position to give it back because you’re there and of course that went through my mind.”
After a tense finale where there was no indication Norris would concede, he did pull over and insisted he had always planned to comply. Having done so, however, he said: “I know what I’m going to do and what I’m not going to do. Of course, I’m going to just question it and challenge it and that’s what I did.
“I was put in this situation and it’s not my fault that I was leading the race in a way. The team should have just boxed Oscar first and we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. As a team, maybe we could have done things slightly differently.”
