GP of Brazil: Lando Norris “not proud” of sprint victory by team order

Lando Norris said he was not proud of winning Saturday's sprint race at the Brazilian Grand Prix after McLaren ordered his teammate Oscar Piastri to leave the lead with two laps to go.

McLaren called for cars to be swapped to maximize Norris' chances in the title fight with Max Verstappen. After starting from pole position ahead of Norris, Piastri led the first 21 laps of the race before the pit wall ordered him to give up the position on the 22nd of 24 laps.

“I’m not proud of winning a race like today,” said Norris. “I'm working hard to do a better job later in qualifying (for Sunday's Grand Prix) and to put myself in a better position for the race.”

“We want to avoid it as much as possible, but at the same time we are committed to it and we have to work together as a team. We are told what to do, we have a boss. We do the best we can and we can help each other.”

At first it seemed Norris expected the swap to happen earlier in the race, and on lap 7 he radioed the team and said: “I'm not sure what I'm doing here, mate. I thought we talked about it.”

On lap 16, Norris' engineer informed him that there would be a swap on the final lap, but this plan was abandoned on lap 22 after Nico Hülkenberg's Haas stopped on the side of the road and it became clear that a VSC would be used to replace it to recover him.

The swap was successfully carried out ahead of the VSC – after which overtaking is banned – and ensured Norris scored eight points while Verstappen, who was third pending an investigation, scored six points.

“We discussed a lot of different scenarios,” Norris said of McLaren’s pre-race plans. “It was difficult to do it a lot earlier because the guys behind were pretty close.

“I think there was a round, but it's always difficult to suddenly plan and implement it. I think we did the best job we could, we won, both cars up there.”

“Of course the (virtual) safety car threatened us a little bit and we were lucky that we didn’t have to do it again after that. But there are always these risks at the beginning of the race, in the middle of the race, the end of the race is never easy. So we planned it and implemented it well.