Lando Norris ‘British bias’ prompt triggers scathing Steiner attack on axed race director

Guenther Steiner has joked that Lando Norris should thank him for helping him get a new race director in place, as he raced in Singapore with a damaged front wing.

Norris picked up some damage to his front wing flap after making contact with Max Verstappen at the start at Marina Bay, but wasn’t shown a black and orange flag to come in and replace the damaged part.

Guenther Steiner hits out at former F1 race director

Norris raced on to third place in Singapore, with the damaged front wing flag never moving or becoming further dislodged. Indeed, so inconsequential was the damage, that Norris wasn’t aware of the damage initially, and said it had not made much difference to the performance of his car.

With a damaged car on track, the FIA Race Director can make a call to instruct a driver to pit for repairs if it’s felt the damage represents a danger to other drivers, by way of shards of carbon fibre shattering away from the car, as marshals can wave a black-and-orange ‘meatball’ flag to relay the instruction to said driver.

Three years ago, Haas found itself on the losing end of such flags, with Kevin Magnussen receiving three separate black-and-orange flags in 2022 – one of which saw him circulating with a similarly damaged front wing flap on his VF-22 in Singapore. The enforced pitstop to change the front wing ruined his race, and he finished in 12th.

Appearing on the Red Flags Podcast, then-Haas F1 team boss Guenther Steiner said a fundamental difference between the events of Singapore 2022 and ’25 was the removal of a former FIA Race Director.

In 2022, the role was shared between Niels Wittich and Eduardo Freitas, with Freitas dropped after serving at eight Grands Prix. Wittich took on the role full-time for 2023 and most of ’24, before being replaced by the incumbent Rui Marques.

While Steiner didn’t name the Race Director he was speaking about, a logical deduction would be that it would be Freitas, based on the information Steiner did reveal.

Steiner was asked to address a listener’s prompt that Norris not being shown the black-and-orange flag was due to “British bias”, which he scoffed at.

“I need to give you the full story behind all this bulls**t here,” Steiner said.

“At the time, there was a race director, and he wasn’t British. The guy was just not up to being an F1 race director.

“He did, I think, five or six races (sic), and then they sent him back where he came from, to WEC, because the guy was obsessed by parts on the car.

“We explained to this guy, ‘if it is like this, we can explain how the wing is made, the part will not fall off’.

“He didn’t care. ‘Oh, it’s dangerous, you need to come in’.

“I don’t know how many times we lost points because of this dude, and then how it was sorted was, all of a sudden, Fernando Alonso loses a rearview mirror, and that was okay!

“Then, Mohammed Ben Sulayem got involved and changed the rule so that it’s actually okay to have pieces hanging loose.

“We actually got points taken away, so I think what they do now is the right thing. The team is responsible for what they are doing. All the teams know how the wing is constructed. The parts will not fall off.

“There is a material in it, I think it is Zylon they’ve in there, which doesn’t break if you don’t cut it off with a knife.

“We had the same, but the rules changed.”

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Guenther Steiner: Former race director would have made Lando Norris pit

The former Haas team boss went on to say that he believes the current level of risk assessment and greater leniency when it comes to evaluating car damage is far more logical than it was during that frustrating period in 2022, and said Norris’ not being instructed to pit for repairs could be down to Steiner’s constant complaints about that situation.

“This race director, who had these ideas, was never seen again in Formula 1. Rightly so, because the guy, you could just not talk to him,” he said.

“You can speak with everybody in a normal way, try to explain things. He said he didn’t care. ‘I’m the race director, I do what I find is right’.

“Lando should thank me! He would have been made to change his front wing.

“I think, at the moment, they do it right, but, at the time when we had it, it was always us, and I got so pissed with the people.

“Then, the best thing was to put salt in the wound when Fernando was alright to lose the rear-view mirror, which is a lot more dangerous than us.

“The rear mirror was hanging off, flapping – he cannot see behind, and, if the mirror flies off and kills somebody or hits somebody, what happens then?

“That was okay because the President got involved at the time. Obviously, I voiced my opinion to the president at the time. Leave it at that!”

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