Max Verstappen believes that Lando Norris ‘didn’t mean’ his comments after the Brazilian Grand Prix. The McLaren star labelled the Dutchman’s climb from P17 to win as ‘lucky’, declaring that George Russell was actually the deserving winner of the event.
Norris’ frustrations were understandable. He was trailing Russell while boasting a clear race pace advantage, but after the two Brits came in to make their first pit stops, Franco Colapinto slammed into the barrier, bringing out a red flag which afforded a free tyre change to Verstappen and some of the others who stayed out.
From here, Verstappen made his way past race leader Esteban Ocon and stormed into the distance to take a remarkable race win. Norris, meanwhile, could only secure a P6 finish after a messy final stint in which he made a couple of costly errors while overdriving his MCL38 machine.
“You can change the tyres under the red flag,” Norris said after the race in Sao Paulo. “It’s what the others did. Just unlucky. Unfortunate. Sometimes it goes your way. Nothing we did wrong. I don’t care what people say.
“Staying out wasn’t the right thing to do. It shouldn’t have been red-flagged, and there was the crash in the end, which caused the red. That’s life sometimes. You take a gamble, it’s paid off for them. It’s not talent, it’s just luck. A bit unlucky, that’s all.”
These comments were widely debated, with Norris’ supporters arguing that without the intervention of the red flag, Verstappen wouldn’t have been able to make his way past the McLaren driver or early race leader Russell.
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