Lando Norris has honestly admitted that he would have been nowhere near the battle for victory in Saturday’s Montreal Sprint race, had it not been for the two Mercedes cars that started ahead battling with each other. George Russell got a great start from pole position while Kimi Antonelli also got away well enough to hold on to second place.
And it looked like they were going to speed off into the distance from there, with Norris already two and a half seconds adrift of the two Silver Arrows by the second lap. But he was allowed back into the contest when Antonelli launched an ambitious overtake attempt on his team-mate.
The teenager felt he was pushed off track by Russell when he tried to go around the outside into turn one. And, on the same lap, he again locked up and went off track into the turn eight chicane, leading to him bouncing across the grass and slowing him down significantly. That allowed Norris to catch up and overtake, immediately putting pressure on Russell.
The Mercedes man managed to hold off his compatriot to win the Sprint but Norris was comfortably ahead of Antonelli for the most part, except for a late lunge which saw the Italian again go off track and have to concede the position back to the McLaren.
Relfecting on what happened, though, Norris admitted that he was lucky that the Mercedes drivers had slowed each other down, otherwise he felt he would have been nowhere near them. “It was certainly nice to be in that position, but I was only in that position because they battled,” the defending drivers’ champion said.
“If they didn’t battle, I [would have been] 10 seconds behind. They were so much faster than us and we were lucky that they battled. I took advantage of it, but today showed that the three-tenths gap we had yesterday, even though it looked like we could close that, the pace they had in the race was just on another level compared to us. There are so many things we have to improve on, maybe into Monaco or Barcelona, hopefully.”
As for the Mercedes pair, team principal Toto Wolff said he hopes his drivers have got it out of their systems and that they will abide by the internal rules of engagement that they have agreed to in this intra-team title battle. He said: “You could see how quickly it goes. You create a gap with two cars and then you start to fight a bit, and you can lose a race.
“If it goes on longer and it’s a bit unlucky for us, and it’s the Grand Prix, then Norris may well win. You don’t want to lose a race because you crashed into each other. Sometimes it needs a little moment to remind ourselves what our objectives are.
“This is not particularly against one or the other, but there’s a framework that we want to establish and I’d rather have it in a Sprint race, where it’s not a lot of points, than in a main race. We don’t want to start, at race five, to have headlines that this is escalating, because it’s not. It’s the emotion. He’s a young driver and I think George would have probably done the same, so we just need to see how we handle it.”