MONTREAL — Lando Norris stepped up to the microphone, took a deep breath, and looked up at the journalists the other side of the fence. The questions he was about to face were obvious.

Less than an hour earlier he had driven into the back of title rival and McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri while battling for fourth, ending his Canadian Grand Prix three laps short. It was a shocking moment in the context of Norris’ season, which has been a far from convincing audition from a man looking to win his first championship.

Sunday was the lowest point of his topsy turvy 2025 season so far, but Norris faced the situation with a refreshing honesty not often seen at the top level of motor racing.

“I should never have gone for it, it’s my complete hindsight thing,” Norris said when asked by ESPN to explain the move from his point of view. “I thought he was starting to drift a little bit to the right, so there was an opportunity to go the left.

“But yeah. Way too much risk, especially on my teammate. Happy nothing happened to him, and I paid the price for my mistake.”

It certainly was a significant price. Norris was immediately eliminated from the race, his car banging along the retaining wall running down to Turn 1. Piastri finished fourth, extending his championship lead over Norris to 22 points in the process.

While not an insurmountable gap by any means — Norris could retake the lead if he wins the Austrian Grand Prix in two weeks’ time and Piastri fails to finish — it will serve as another broadside to those who passionately defend his championship credentials. The clumsy drive into the back of his teammate will have reinforced the growing view held by critics that Norris is an immensely talented driver prone to big mistakes at crucial moments. It is certainly hard to make a case for Norris being the McLaren driver most obviously ready to win the title at the moment.

Norris has always batted away outside noise, insisting he only cares what those close to him think. Tellingly, Norris’ thoughts on Sunday evening were not on the state of play in the championship, but on the team he has driven for since he made his Formula 1 debut in 2019 (and one which signed him to its junior programme even earlier).

“I’ve let down the team, so that’s going to stay with me for a little while,” Norris said sullenly when in front of the written press.

“When I let them down like this, and when I make a fool of myself in a moment like today, yeah, I have a lot of regret in something like that. I’m not proud of that, and I feel bad and I feel like I let down my team. And that’s always the worst feeling. Of course, I only really need to apologise to all of them and Oscar as well.”

Internally at McLaren, Norris’ immediate contrition had gone a long way. Even as long ago as last year there was a feeling within the team the harmonious relationship between Norris and Piastri could not last. They were too young, too closely matched, too ambitious and desperate to call themselves world champion. Ever since it became obvious they have the class-leading car in the field, McLaren had feared the moment their title-chasing drivers occupied the same inch of tarmac. McLaren boss Andrea Stella had said it was a matter of “when” not “if” mere days ago — the “when” came in memorable fashion on Sunday. But for anyone expecting a nuclear fallout or the moment which would fracture the relationship between the McLaren drivers, they would have been bitterly disappointed.

Immediate self-criticism is rare in Formula 1. Norris’ was a stark contrast to the petulant way Max Verstappen had responded two weeks ago to an obvious mistake of his own — the moment the four-time world champion angrily drove into the side of George Russell’s car, earning himself a punishment that moved him to the verge of a race ban. Verstappen was unapologetic in the immediate aftermath — even vaguely mocking of Russell, while he had asked “does it matter?” to the question of whether it was appropriate for a world champion to drive into his rivals. Verstappen only rowed back the following day, when he posted a statement to social media that the incident “was not right.” Notably, the statement stopped short of an apology.

After fielding questions repeatedly during media day on Thursday, Verstappen was still irritated by the topic this weekend, saying the media was “pissing me off” and adding that they were “childish” for bringing it up again after qualifying.

Norris, perhaps the most self-critical driver on the grid, ensured there was no repeat of that. He could easily have gone the same way. Commendably, given that the incident was clearly of his doing, he shouldered all the blame from the first instance. Norris had apologised before he even climbed out of the car, radioing the team to say: “All my bad. All my fault. Stupid from me.” He then went to McLaren team boss Stella to apologise. Then, while doing a TV interview, he broke off briefly to go to Piastri alongside him, shake the Australian’s hand, look him in the eye and say sorry.

His reaction impressed the man who Norris is locked in the title fight with.

“Lando has apologised to me, so I guess that says a little bit,” Piastri said in his own session. “Lando is a very good guy. I think it is in his character and his personality to say exactly what he thinks and … if that is detrimental to himself or about himself it doesn’t matter to him and I think that is a great quality of Lando. It’s good for the whole team going forwards that we can have these conversations and go racing like this and have things not go the way we want and get through them.”

Stella echoed the sentiment.

“We did appreciate the fact that Lando immediately owned the situation,” he said. “He raised his hand, he took responsibility for the accident, and he apologised immediately to the team, he came to apologise to me as team principal in order to apologise to the entire team.”

Stella then added something perhaps more noteworthy in the longer term of Norris’ season. The immediate headlines of the Canadian Grand Prix will focus on the ramifications on the title fight for Norris and what it says about him as a championship contender. Those articles and the questions they will raise will be fair: the British driver’s inconsistency has been in stark contrast to the calculated, ruthless performances of Piastri. It would be a brave bet right now to say Norris has what it takes to both overturn the deficit to Piastri and then keep the lead all the way to the finish.

But this is a long season. Silverstone’s British Grand Prix in three weeks’ time is the half-way point in what has become a ridiculously bloated championship campaign. It probably goes a long way to explaining why the tension between the McLaren drivers has not exploded into acrimony just yet — the two appear to genuinely like each other (something which will be helped by the way Norris handled himself on Sunday).

McLaren’s fear that their drivers were eventually going to collide came from the decision to let them both race, equally, and without restriction. It has been a policy the team has tweaked since the controversial “papaya rules” saga at last year’s Italian Grand Prix, when both drivers went into the Roggia chicane with a slightly different idea about what CEO Zak Brown had meant when he said to not take any unnecessary risks. On that occasion, Piastri had swung around the outside of Norris, who had done well to avoid a spin. Looking back now, it was one of the first indicators of how the 2025 season might play out.

The first on-track collision between the orange cars might have given Brown or Stella reason to revise their approach to close-quarters racing. Plenty of people have taken aim at Norris’ frankness, or even how open he has been in the past about his mental health struggles as a young man, and framed them as weakness. Those are topics and arguments for another day. What was clear leaving Montreal was that, by reacting to his clash with Piastri in a manner totally in line with the character he has always displayed, Norris did himself a favour he might not immediately come to appreciate.

As Stella pointed out on Sunday, Norris’ sincere contrition had meant McLaren have no reason to consider changing the approach which allowed Norris to get close enough to drive into Piastri in the first place.

Stella said on Sunday: “It may have an impact in terms of his confidence, but it’s up to us as a team to show our full support to Lando, and on this one I want to be completely clear, it’s full support to Lando.

“We will have conversations, and the conversations may be even tough, but there’s no doubt over the support we give to Lando, and over the fact that we will preserve our parity and equality in terms of how we go racing at McLaren between our two drivers. That situation would be different if Lando would have not taken responsibility and apologised.”