Norris Accepts He May Sound ‘Like An Idiot’ On Team Radio After Dutch GP Outburst

Posted on September 1, 2023 | by Charley Williams It didn’t take long for Lando Norris’ radio message to do the rounds after the Dutch GP. Having started second of the grid in Zandvoort, McLaren’s hesitance to pit and change to inters during the downpour on the opening laps led to quite the rant from Lando. Though it wasn’t aired on the main broadcast, it emerged that, as the circuit got wetter, Lando asked the team to stop for intermediates, but McLaren was just one of several teams that wanted to brave the conditions and wait for the weather to pass. As the weather worsened, Norris responded frustratingly to his race engineer: “What the f***, are you stupid?” Eventually, Lando took matters into his own hands and boxed on lap 3. On Thursday’s press conference ahead of the Italian GP, Lando was asked about his radio outburst, he said: “We just spoke about it a bit just now. There’s always obviously a few days of kind of reviewing things and making sure we look at things first. “But, yeah, I mean, I always say things that- when you look at it after, you always think, like… I always make myself look like an idiot, and I get that. “But people that I speak to, they know I would never mean something like that, of course. It’s more, we made some mistakes with our calls, our strategy, things like that. A bit of it is just emotions at the time.” Lando isn’t the first driver to rant at his engineer, and he most certainly won’t be the last. Over the past few years, Yuki Tsunoda has been criticised by AlphaTauri team principal Franz Tost for airing his frustrations in this way, and it’s something Yuki himself has admitted to working on. Even Max Verstappen and his race engineer, Gianpiero Lambiase, bicker “like an old married couple”. ???? But Norris feels this instance isn’t anything to worry about and doesn’t reflect how the team works. “People always judge things from the outside and like to make comments, but the team know how I work and how we say things and so forth,” he said. “So, as long as they know that and I know how they do things and how they speak to me, and how we interpret things, that’s all that, from my side, is needed.” Just a normal driver – engineer exchange then?