AUSTIN, Texas — Lando Norris says it frustrates him that people assume he and McLaren teammate Daniel Ricciardo do not get along.
Ricciardo joined Norris at McLaren in 2021 but will leave the team at the end of the year.
The circumstances around Ricciardo’s premature McLaren departure fueled speculation and memes online that the pair are not friendly, despite the fact the two clearly have a good relationship and are often joking around together in McLaren videos and in the paddock.
“We love being teammates,” Norris told ESPN. “I’ve loved being his teammate, learning from him, spending time with him.
“People are just too easy to judge nowadays. It’s something that’s ruining the world in many ways. Things are great. I’ve loved working with him, I’ll miss him, but I’m sure I’ll race him in the future.”
Norris thinks too many things can get twisted or spun around.
“It’s so easy now for one word to be turned into a headline,” he said. “People are silly and stupid enough to believe one word, they don’t even read the story. You get those kind of people who want to believe what they want to see immediately.
“But there are two main reasons. Me and Carlos [Sainz], we worked very well together, everyone knew how great we were together, our little bromance!
“Then it was just a fresh start, working with someone different. People grew up seeing me and Carlos working together and saw me and that personality.
“Then all of a sudden changing to someone different, someone who has been in F1 for so many more years, someone who’s the top dog, coming from a big team who’s won several races. There’s always going to be that feeling of ‘this is my chance to beat him, this is his chance to prove himself.’
“People then want to create a story off of that. We are quite different people and just because of what’s happened on track and some of his struggles, people want to cause more of these stories and create stories.
“But they don’t see us. They seem maybe what they see briefly on TV but they don’t see us in the paddock or behind closed doors at McLaren together. We have so many good laughs — too many sometimes!”