Lando Norris admits he was torn on whether to give back a position to Oscar Piastri or hold on and win the Hungarian Grand Prix because he still believes he can beat Max Verstappen to the championship.
Piastri took the lead at the start of the race and retained it relatively comfortably until a mistake at Turn 11 saw him drop to within two seconds of Norris. McLaren then made its final pit stop with Norris first to try and reduce any outside threat of losing track position to Lewis Hamilton behind, but the undercut allowed Norris to take the lead and while he was instructed to give it back to Piastri in the closing stages, he debated the situation with the team for a number of laps before doing so.
“These things are always going to go through your mind,” Norris said. “You’ve got to be selfish in this sport at times. You’ve got to think of yourself, that’s priority number one — think of yourself. I’m also a team player. My mind was going pretty crazy at the time.
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“I know what we’ve done in the past between Oscar and myself, he’s helped me plenty of times, and I think this is a different situation. This is not someone helping one another. I was put into a position, and we were undoing that position change.
“But I mean I’m also — and I know a lot of people are going to say, the gap between me and Max is pretty big, 60, 70, 80 points or something — but if Red Bull and Max make the mistakes like they did today, and continue to do that, and as a team we continue to improve and have weekends like we’ve had this weekend, we can turn it around.
“It’s still optimistic. It’s still a big goal to say we can close 70 points, as a driver I can close 70 points in half a season. When you’re thinking of the seven or six points that I give away, it crosses your mind, for sure. So, it was not easy. But I also understood the situation I was in, and I was quite confident always by the last lap I would have done it.”
Norris — who is now 76 points behind Verstappen in the standings after the Dutchman finished fifth — also says he didn’t need to confirm to the team that he was planning on giving the place up late in the race, despite the concern it appeared to cause based on radio messages from his engineer.
“I know what I’m going to do, and what I’m not going to do,” Norris said. “Of course I’m going to just question it and challenge it, and that’s what I did.
“I was going to wait until the last lap, the last corner, but then they said if there was a safety car all of a sudden, and I couldn’t let Oscar go through, then it would have made me look like a bit of an idiot. So then I was like, ‘Yeah, fair point.’ So I let him go with two [laps] to go or something, and straightaway I let him go.
“I mean, that’s just your opinion of what you hear. But that’s the same with all sports. You can make what you will of what you hear and what you think you know and that kind of stuff. I know I was always going to give it back unless they changed their mind on what they were saying — and they didn’t, so all good.”
Despite his questioning of the decision, Norris also says McLaren did not make any incorrect calls in instructing him to return the lead to Piastri, who went on and took his first grand prix victory.
“No, I didn’t lose the win there, I lost the win off the line. I just had a bad start,” he said. “Something happened on my second shift, and I lost all my momentum, Oscar got to the inside and that was that.
“I got put into the lead rather than wanting to. I feel like we made things way too hard for ourselves and way too tricky for ourselves. We should have just boxed Oscar first and things would have been simple. They gave me the lead, and I gave it back. I shouldn’t have won today. I didn’t deserve to win, because of my start and Oscar’s good start, and that’s that.
“I know I was in that position for a while and 16, 17 laps or whatever, 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 — seven points that I’m going to lose, but I think the real fact is that I almost shouldn’t have had them in the first place, I shouldn’t have had them in my hands.”