The other obvious lesson from Norris’s Montreal blunder: Keep off the grass

The number one lesson for Lando Norris after his desperate, race-ending move in Canada was obvious.

So obvious it should not have needed pointing out in the first place, let alone in the aftermath. It is pretty much the number one rule for any racing driver: Don’t crash into your team mate.

Did the racing gods chuckle at each other when they heard Norris refer to such a collision as “inevitable” last Thursday in Montreal?

“We never said we’re going to avoid everything,” he told the official F1 channel. “I think we’ve been actually quite open in saying, at some point something is probably going to happen and we just have to be ready for that.”

“I think Andrea [Stella, team principal] said it is not an ‘if’, it’s a ‘when’, and we’ll see when that time comes. Of course we’ll try and avoid everything as much as possible, but it’s inevitable that it happens in a race.”

Norris could at least claim he was in good company after tangling with his McLaren team mate Oscar Piastri on the pit straight in Montreal.

The team’s all-champion duo of Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button did much the same during the 2011 race. On that occasion Hamilton was the driver attacking and it worked out exactly as well for him as it did for Norris – i.e., he retired on the spot. Button, like Piastri, motored on to finish and, in his case, win.

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The similarities between the two incidents are mostly superficial. Hamilton’s attempt to pass his team mate was not as optimistic as Norris’s was.

Button had just made a mistake in the preceding chicane when his team mate made to pass him. The speed difference between the cars was greater and, unlike Norris, Hamilton got his front wheels alongside his team mate’s car before they made contact.

Hamilton’s move was risky because he attempted it in wet conditions where Button couldn’t see him easily in his mirrors. Norris’s move never looked on: he was catching Piastri only slowly and put his two left-hand wheels onto the grass before running into the back of his team mate’s car.

This wasn’t the first time this year Norris has indulged in a spot of mid-race lawnmowing and it’s starting to look like a bad habit. He first did it while trying to prise the lead from Verstappen’s hands at Suzuka.

This followed an audacious piece of pit work by him and McLaren which almost paid off. The team had a clear run from their garage position to the track exit, so when they brought Norris in on the same lap as Verstappen he had the benefit of an unimpeded run back onto the pit straight.

Norris emerged partly alongside Verstappen and drew closer to nosing ahead as he accelerated away from the pit lane more quickly. So much so that the Red Bull driver accused him of disengaging his pit lane speed limiter too early.

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But Verstappen still had a nose ahead and drifted to the right – as he was fully entitled to – ensuring the McLaren driver would run out of room. Rather than stand his ground and risk a collision with the Red Bull, Norris ran onto the grass and rejoined behind Verstappen.

“He drove himself into the grass,” Verstappen stated on his radio. “Yeah, we know the game, Max,” replied his race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase. “As you are.”

Norris didn’t endear himself to Imola’s groundskeeper either when he made an attempt to pass George Russell on lap 10. Stuck behind the Mercedes as its tyres went off, Norris made for the inside line approaching the Villeneuve left-hander.

When Russell left him no room, Norris took to the grass and came perilously close to wiping out his front wing on a corner marker. “He just drove on the grass,” noted Russell on his radio, much as Verstappen had done.

What happened on Sunday was almost a carbon copy of that Imola moment, with the difference that Piastri was following the racing line as he moved towards the edge of the track, so Norris had even less reason to expect he would be left any room. Significantly, just as when he tried to pass Russell, Norris wasn’t even alongside Piastri when he took to the grass.

It’s too easy to use the luxury of time to pull apart decisions drivers have only split-seconds to make. But with that caveat, Norris’s instinctive reaction to indulge in a spot of rallying is not serving him well.

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Is Norris just ‘playing for a penalty’ and hoping the other driver will be sanctioned for forcing him off? At a stretch, that case might have been made at Suzuka, but he was nowhere near close enough to make that claim in the other two cases.

Norris’s ability in wheel-to-wheel combat came in for some criticism last year as he failed in his bid to beat Max Verstappen to the world championship. The circumstances were different then: Verstappen was protecting a substantial points lead and could afford to take a tough line on Norris, knowing any collision would favour him. Even so, Norris’s driving was guileless at times.

In 2025 he is still coming up short, but in a different way, and last weekend’s error was clearly his worst yet. To his credit, he took full responsibility even before climbing out of his bent MCL39, and afterwards said he was glad he hadn’t taken his team mate out with him.

That will have been a chastening experience in a season of too many frustrations for Norris. While he surely won’t need a reminder not to crash into his team mate again, there is another lesson he needs to note: Keep off the grass.

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• The other obvious lesson from Norris’s Montreal blunder: Keep off the grass

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