Lando Norris could not resist a mischievous thought as the F1 field circulated at a snail's pace behind the Safety Car during the closing moments of Sunday’s British Grand Prix
With victory already out of reach, the McLaren driver briefly entertained the idea of pulling off one of Silverstone's most infamous tricks.
He was hunting for a loophole, scheming to steal a podium – or perhaps the entire race – right from under the noses of his rivals.
It was a flash of opportunism that harked back to one of the sport’s greatest rule-book controversies – the move that made Michael Schumacher the centre of a storm in F1 nearly three decades ago.
A cheeky radio plot
In the heat of the moment, Norris’s mind flashed back to 1998, the year Schumacher infamously won at Silverstone by diving into the pit lane on the very last lap to serve a penalty, crossing the timing line before actually reaching his pit box.
With the pack bunched up and helpless behind the Safety Car, Norris wondered if he could pull off a modern interpretation of the ultimate heist.
He keyed his radio to test the waters with his pit wall.
“You’re not allowed to box are you? You can’t win it in the pit lane?” Norris queried over team radio.
His race engineer, Will Joseph, was quick to shut down the audacious plan, knowing the governing body had long since closed that particular avenue of intrigue.
“No, you’re not,” came the response from his race engineer Will Joseph. Norris replied: “Shame.”
The history books show that Schumacher's controversial stunt – which led to a massive post-race dispute and the eventual resignation of all three stewards involved – forced the FIA to rewrite the rulebook.
Today, the regulations explicitly forbid a driver from taking the chequered flag via the pit lane to gain an unfair advantage under neutralization.
Counting the blessings of a brutal weekend
With his tactical coup thwarted, Norris had to settle for crossing the line in fourth.
It was a result heavily gifted by the late-race misfortunes of frontrunners Andrea Kimi Antonelli and Verstappen, offering a flattering gloss to an otherwise agonizing weekend where the McLaren MCL38 behaved more like a bucking bronco than a championship-winning car.
©McLaren
After parking his car, the Briton was brutally honest about the lack of performance that drove him to seek such desperate, clever measures in the first place.
"Considering how not nice it’s felt out there, P4 and a P3 this weekend in the Sprint is quite remarkable, honestly,” Norris said when summing up his weekend.
"Of course we were lucky today, but the race is also about finishing. It’s about reliability and not making mistakes. I don’t know what happened to Max and Kimi."
While the points haul keeps his title defense on track, the underlying issues left the McLaren camp with plenty of homework before the next round.
"Poor start today, I don’t know why, so we have to understand some things. Also the car just wasn’t very nice in any way whatsoever today, so we have a lot to improve," Norris admitted freely.
"The positive is the results, and that’s really the only thing that matters at the end of the day, but the pace to get them was really, really not good. We need to take a big step forward."
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