4 Days After Blaming Max Verstappen, Lando Norris Issues Heartfelt Apology for Hurting Sentiments

If you don’t know what happened at the Hungarian GP (rather, after it), here’s a quick recap. Max Verstappen won the race by a 33-second margin to Lando Norris in second, who Sergio Perez closely followed. During the podium celebrations, Norris did his trademark champagne bottle popping, which resulted in Verstappen’s porcelain trophy falling and, unsurprisingly, breaking. And for the past four days, the headlines haven’t been Red Bull breaking McLaren’s 1988 record of 11 consecutive wins. Instead, they’ve concentrated more on the aftermath of Norris’ actions, and Media Day at the Belgian GP provided another update.

After the podium celebrations, Lando was asked what happened on the podium with Max’s trophy. He jokingly replied, “Max just placed [his trophy] too close to the edge. It fell over, I guess. Not my problem. It’s his!” He even added that as long as it wasn’t his trophy that broke, he didn’t care that Max’s wasn’t intact. And even though he said all this in humor, many people didn’t take it that way, and the Brit received a lot of flak for it, especially from Hungarians.

For Hungarians, the trophy is a priceless artifact handcrafted by the Herend Porcelain Manufactory over six months. The 97-year-old company specializes in luxury hand-painted and gilded porcelain, and, needless to say, the $45,000 trophy has a certain significance to the Hungarian culture. Because of this, when Norris seemed so casually dismissive about his actions—even after apologizing—that’s still one of the first things he’s being asked about and made to feel guilty. And that was the case at Spa.

This time, when he replied, he ensured his intentions were clear. Replying to David Croft’s question in the FIA Thursday Press conference on the same, Norris said, “I had no intention in never doing such a thing. And I know how much it means to the Hungarians & part of their culture & so forth. Of course, I wanna enjoy my time, it was never my intention to do such a thing. I did apologize to Max & obviously made couple of jokes about it which maybe I shouldn’t. I do feel bad for, if he did it to my trophy, I’d be annoyed so; I do apologize for it.” While people are still making him feel guilty about what happened, Red Bull extended him and McLaren an olive branch.

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Red Bull forgives Lando Norris for his actions

After the incident, McLaren posted a video of the incident on Twitter and captioned it, “We are so, so sorry…@redbullracing and @Max33Verstappen! 🫣” Red Bull replied to it, writing, “We’re gonna need some glue 👀” Although at that point it wasn’t confirmed that Herend Porcelain would be making Max another trophy, Red Bull made a classy gesture as an olive branch by commenting on another one of McLaren’s posts.

Celebrating another good race weekend, McLaren posted a photo with the entire team, captioning it, “🧡 T E A M 🧡” Red Bull commented on the post, writing, “We should have done one together.” That would’ve been an iconic picture, considering Red Bull broke McLaren’s record (and Norris, in turn, broke Verstappen’s trophy). But even though that picture opportunity didn’t happen, it made one thing certain—Red Bull and McLaren are on as good terms as Lando and Max are.

Do you think Lando Norris can ever live this incident down?

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