‘Way too emotional’ Lando Norris criticised for "really stupid" move

Lando Norris is “way too emotional” and making too many mistakes at critical moments, according to former F1 driver Juan Pablo Montoya.

Norris endured a disastrous Canadian Grand Prix with an error in qualifying forcing him to fight his way through the field, before he caused a collision with McLaren teammate and title rival Oscar Piastri.

The Briton ran into the back of Piastri’s McLaren and suffered race-ending damage when attempting to overtake as the pair battled over fourth place in the closing stages in Montreal.

Norris, who has fallen 22 points behind Piastri in the championship standings, accepted full blame for the incident and has apologised to his teammate and McLaren.

Assessing a costly weekend for Norris in the title race, seven-time F1 race winner Montoya told CasinoHawks: “There were two big ones [mistakes] actually. Firstly, in qualifying. The Q3 thing is getting out of hand.

“Over the past few weeks, he has looked like he is controlling the situation and is better than Oscar. And he gets to Q3, and he just can’t put it together. And it's hard to see because he seems to have more speed than Oscar. But Oscar is just there always to collect the pieces.

"Lando is just way too emotional. I really like him. I feel for him because of the way his emotions are, each time he's putting himself in a harder situation. He's very calm all weekend and executes all weekend.

“And then he gets to that last Q3 and something clicks in his head and he thinks: ‘Now I cannot screw up.’ And you know, when you think about not screwing up is when you normally screw up.

“In the collision, I think he thought that Oscar was going to get through the corner, and Lando was just going to be good enough to squeeze through.

“But if you're going on a straight line and there's grass, you might get away with putting the car on the grass. But there's a corner there.

“So even if Oscar had given him a bit of room and he put the tyres on the grass, he was going to come out backwards out of that deal. So even if he didn't hit Oscar, that wouldn't work. It is unnecessarily impatient.

“He did all the hard work, came back from five seconds behind, caught him, got a chance to pass him and then he didn't take advantage of it.

“You need to force Oscar into making mistakes instead of you making the mistakes.

Should Lando Norris have got a bigger penalty?

The stewards investigated the collision on Sunday evening and handed Norris a five-second penalty, which made no difference to his race result given he was classified down in 18th.

Norris’s seemingly lenient penalty raised questions as to why he didn’t also pick up penalty points on his licence, or a grid drop for the next race in Austria.

While the dishing out of penalty points is purely left to the stewards’ discretion, they decided to give Norris a smaller penalty on the basis that the incident did not impact another driver’s result.

But Montoya believes Norris warranted getting penalty points for what he branded as being a “really stupid” move on Piastri.

“People were saying that Lando got a penalty for the incident, but didn't get any points on his license,” he added.

“Why, if you're giving somebody a five-second penalty for reckless driving and causing an incident, did he not get at least a point on his license?

"That’s what Max always complains about, which is why he also talks about where someone’s passport is from.

“Do you have levels where you can get a penalty without points? Normally, everybody who does something stupid gets points on his license.

“What Lando did was really stupid. He created a collision. You either penalise him or you don’t.”