“Sorry I made the swap a little harder than it needed to be. First F1 win – thank you very much.”
Just laps earlier, frantic messages were headed Norris’ way thick and fast.
“The way to win a championship is not by yourself – it’s with the team,” McLaren told Norris as they urged him to relent as he showed no signs of doing so.
“You’re going to need Oscar, and you’re going to need the team. Just remember every single Sunday morning team meeting we have. Lando, you’ve proved your point...”
Loading
The incident drew instant comparisons to one of the most awkward moments in F1 history when, at Malaysia’s Sepang in 2013, Sebastian Vettel refused to let Australian star Mark Webber past.
Webber is now Piastri’s manager and a long-time mentor.
But while Vettel disobeyed team orders and showed the kind of ruthlessness that made him a multiple-time world champion, Norris saw the bigger picture this time around – a 1-2 finish for his team as he edged closer in this year’s title race with Verstappen.
Piastri, the bayside Melbourne product, joins Sir Jack Brabham (14 times), Alan Jones (12), Webber (9) and Daniel Ricciardo (8) as an Australian F1 race winner.
After the race, Norris’ maturity showed.
“It’s an amazing day for us as a team – that’s the main thing,” he told Sky Sports before the podium presentations.
“He got me off the line and controlled the race well. He deserved it today.”
But when former world champion Nico Rosberg, who famously pulled the pin on his top-flight career after proving his own point in beating then-teammate Hamilton to the 2016 title, quizzed Norris on his true feelings about the result, the Brit tellingly said: “The team asked me to do it (to relent), so I did it.”
Piastri maintained his composure, thanking McLaren for wiser heads prevailing.
“It was a bit complicated at the end,” he said. “[But] I put myself in the right position at the start.
“What an amazing feeling to be able to manage a race like that and secure a 1-2.”
And asked how worried Piastri was that Norris wouldn’t let him past, Piastri said openly: “The longer you leave it, the more you get a bit nervous, but it was well executed by the team.”
Speaking to Sky Sports after the presentations, McLaren team principal Andrea Stella told Rosberg – whose at-times fractious on-track relationship with Hamilton made constant headlines: “None of us, the team, Lando, Oscar, can go [it] alone. That’s the message, and that’s the message that we discuss on a Sunday morning [prior to a race], and with race drivers – Nico can remind us – you need to refresh this message. That’s why we have these meetings every Sunday and we are extremely pleased our drivers are supporting the trajectory of McLaren.”
News, results and expert analysis from the weekend of sport sent every Monday. Sign up for our Sport newsletter.