Norris wanted blue flags for Verstappen: 'Really hated him'

The McLaren driver had a pretty good weekend in the principality of Monaco. For a long time, Oscar Piastri's teammate looked set to finish in tenth place, but a problem with Yuki Tsunoda's car allowed Norris to take ninth.

Unlapping Verstappen

When rain fell, it became a completely different race. Where the Briton was slower than Tsunoda before the rain, Norris was suddenly faster than Max Verstappen in the rain. With that, Norris was hoping for a little help from race control: "I wanted Max to get blue flags. It would probably be the first time in his life he would have had blue flags. So I was really hoping to pass him because he would have hated it, and I would have loved it, it would have been funny! But he was leading the Monaco Grand Prix, so I didn't want to intrude too much."

Pit stop to Hards

Just before the rain started falling really hard, the McLaren driver was called in for the hard tyre, which he was able to change after two laps. A real shame, the Brit told me: "The team told me it wasn't going to rain a lot. They said it would be very brief or a little bit, so I was happy to box with the information I had. We probably should have waited a couple of laps to see what just happened. We maybe lost 30 seconds which would have put us up two or three positions, at least."