Lando Norris’ telling gesture just before he attacked Lewis Hamilton

However, the Briton walked into the cooling room and immediately hit back at Lewis Hamilton, who had praised the speed of his car. “Whoa, you guys are fast!” he said. Norris hit back, reminding Hamilton that he too had once had the fastest car on the grid.

The Mercedes man responded and simply said, “I wasn’t complaining, I was just complimenting you on your car!”

Much was made of Norris’ decision to eventually move up and hand Piastri the win. The Australian qualified second behind his team-mate but took the lead after the first corner and Norris admitted he had done the right thing by losing his race when his McLaren colleague passed him.

“I didn’t deserve to win the race,” Norris said. “It’s that simple. The fact that I was in that position was wrong. If Oscar has been leading the whole race, it’s not fair and I don’t think it should be that way, that he just lets me pass him so I can win because I’m fighting for a championship. I didn’t give up the win. I lost it from the starting line.”

Piastri had always been confident his teammate would move aside for him, but was concerned a safety car would derail those plans. “I don’t think I was really worried,” he said.

“The only thing I was a little bit worried about was that if there was a safety car, that the situation would have been taken out of our hands, that control would have been taken out of our hands. So that was really the only thing I was a little bit worried about. But we had talked at the stop that we would sort it out again.”