SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Lando Norris raced to a dominant victory in Sunday’s Singapore Grand Prix but he made sure his McLaren bosses stayed on the edge of their seats until the chequered flag after two close encounters with the wall.
Norris led every lap from pole position and beat Formula One championship rival Max Verstappen by 20 seconds to close the gap at the top to 52 points.
“It was an amazing race. A few too many close calls. You know, I had a couple little moments in the middle, but it was well-controlled, I think,” he told reporters.
The ‘little moments’ came at turns eight and 14, with the leader fearing he had suffered front wing damage in the first incident.
McLaren did not change the wing when he pitted, deciding all was OK. Norris then had another lucky escape on lap 45 when he again skimmed the wall.
His race engineer advised him to have ‘full concentration’ and to take a drink.
“Sometimes it can be that you’re just chilling too much,” said Norris. “Maybe it was a bit of both. I don’t know what it is, but it’s tricky. It was still tough out there, easy to lock the tyres like I did.”
McLaren’s chief executive Zak Brown was able to make light of the ‘close calls’ afterwards.
“Lando said to me in parc ferme ‘hey, did you see I touched the wall?,” he said. “I said “Yeah, we happened to notice. A couple of times’.”
Team principal Andrea Stella said he and Brown had joked that Norris had “maybe wanted to check that we were awake at the pit wall or something.”
“‘Lando, we don’t need to do that. We were fully wide awake’,” he said.
“Luckily there were no consequences. Just a little bit of a thrill and then we could get back in the rhythm.”
(Writing by Alan Baldwin in London, editing by Toby Davis)
