Mexico City ― Lando Norris shrugged off boos from the Mexican crowd on Sunday after the Briton seized back the Formula One championship lead from teammate Oscar Piastri with a dominant win from pole position.
The boos, the reason for which was unclear, could be heard as Norris spoke after the race and as he took the top step of the podium at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez.
“People can do what they want, honestly. They have the right to do it if they want to do it. So I think that’s sport sometimes,” he said. “I don’t know why I can’t stop laughing when I get booed. I think it makes it more entertaining for me. So, yeah, they can keep doing it if they want.
“Of course, you don’t want it. I prefer if people cheer for me. But I don’t know. I just concentrate on doing my things. It was the same in Monza and a few other places.”
A Mexican reporter suggested to Norris in a later press conference that some fans felt he was being gifted the championship at the expense of his Australian teammate. He said a recent poll for his publication had posed the question, “What should Lando do?” with the most popular answer being “return the three points”.
The reference was to the 2025 Italian Grand Prix, where Norris was leading the race but lost out to Piastri on a slow second pit stop, with the team then ordering the drivers to reverse positions to finish second and third.
The situation was the opposite in Hungary in 2024, where Norris let Piastri pass to win on team orders. Other reports indicated local fans were still upset by comments Norris made about home hero Sergio Perez in 2024 when the Mexican was being trounced by teammate Max Verstappen, third on Sunday, at Red Bull.
Whatever the reason, Norris said they had a right to think what they wanted. “As a team, of course, we try to do things fairly,” he said. “But, yeah. Like Oscar deserved the win last year in Budapest, I deserved to be ahead at Monza. Simple as that.”
Meanwhile, Verstappen did not expect to finish on the podium after his struggles in qualifying, so the Dutchman was not overly disappointed that a late virtual safety car denied him the chance to turn his third place into second.
Red Bull’s Verstappen has closed the drivers’ championship gap at the top to 36 points from 40 going into Sunday’s race. The four-time world champion started fifth on the grid after complaining of a lack of grip in Saturday’s qualifying, but the Dutch driver finished less than a second behind Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, who was struggling with his tyres at the end.
A virtual safety car on the penultimate lap, deployed when Carlos Sainz spun and stopped with smoke coming from his Williams, came as a godsend for Leclerc.
“Sometimes the safety car works for you and sometimes it works against you,” Verstappen said. “Would have been fun, I think, to the end.
“Well, maybe a bit more fun for me than for Charles defending, but it would have been a fun ending for everyone to watch.”
Verstappen did an extended first stint on medium tyres before switching to softs while his rivals made earlier pit stops. The strategy paid dividends as he moved past Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton, after an early battle, on lap 47. He then climbed to third when several drivers, including Mercedes’s George Russell, Piastri and Haas’s Oliver Bearman, made second stops.
“I didn’t expect to be on the podium,” Verstappen said. “I think even in the first stint, it was not really looking like it. At the time, I thought we were just slow and struggling on tyres. Once we bolted on the softs we were a bit more competitive, a bit happier.”
Reuters
