Lando Norris admits he won’t always be seen as the “nice guy” as he reflected on the backlash he got for comments on Lewis Hamilton last year.
After the seven-time world champion surpassed Michael Schumacher with his 92nd Formula 1 win in Portugal, the McLaren driver appeared to play down the achievement saying his Mercedes car “should win every race” and that he “has to be one or two drivers, that’s it”.
That led to a lot of criticism from the partisan members of #TeamLH, with Norris later apologising for the “stupid and careless” comment on Twitter.
“It was tricky,” he told Motorsport.com looking back on that brief controversy. “There’s no one I probably respect more in the paddock than Lewis and what he’s done.
“I’ve got one podium, so it’s not like I can talk and say he’s not doing a good job, because I know how hard it is to get a podium in the first place.
“I feel like I’m a nice guy and I try to be a nice guy all of the time. But I also try to speak a bit of the truth sometimes and say what is true, and sometimes people don’t like that.”
Norris though was also keen to stress that anything he says in the media is not meant to be derogatory.
“My comments – and my comments always within Formula 1 – will never be to take anything away from a driver or disrespect what they’ve been able to achieve,” he continued.
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“Maybe I say some bad things sometimes, and it gets portrayed in the wrong way, or maybe I just say something I shouldn’t because I didn’t think properly.
“But it’s just because I’m a human and everyone makes mistakes sometimes. At the end of the day, I never mean something bad against anyone. It’s always an emotion and an outburst which every driver does.
“I’ve made mistakes now, and I’m sure I’m going to make them in the future.”