Lando Norris turns Mexico boos into fuel as “papaya rules” chatter rumbles on
The whistles started before he’d even popped the cork. Lando Norris had just executed a lights-to-flag clinic at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez — every lap led, sixth win of the year — and the new championship leader was met with a wall of boos.
He grinned. He shrugged. He even laughed.
“People can think whatever they want,” Norris said afterwards, asked if he felt McLaren were “giving” him the title. “We try to do things fairly. That was the comment we made back then. The same as Budapest when I let Oscar back through to win a race he deserved. If people think otherwise, they have the right.”
This is where the sport meets the soap opera. Norris arrives in the final stretch of 2025 with momentum heavy enough to bend narratives, and with it the talk has swelled: McLaren, already champions on the constructors’ side, supposedly tilting the table to nudge their No. 4 into Drivers’ title position.
The beats of the conspiracy are familiar. Monza, where a scrambled stop put Norris behind Oscar Piastri and the team later inverted them, citing an initial pit call error. Singapore, where Norris tapped Piastri and avoided an in-race penalty, only for McLaren to issue internal “sporting sanctions” after the flag. Austin, where a chaotic Sprint shunt pitched Piastri into Norris; the team subsequently lifted those sanctions. In the four weekends that followed, Norris kept siphoning points from the other side of the garage, reeling in a 34-point hole and flipping it into the narrowest of leads.
If that sounds like the house setting its own rules, well, that’s F1. Every top team has a handbook for when to swap, when to hold, and when to tidy things up behind closed doors. McLaren’s “papaya rules” have simply been on public display this autumn.
Strip the drama away and what’s left is uncomfortable for the theorists: Norris has beaten Piastri on the bounce, five Sundays running. In Mexico he didn’t just win, he controlled, leaving no oxygen for strategy handwringing. You can’t fake a lights-to-flag victory at altitude when the field’s this tight.
As ever, the boos found him on the cool-down room mic and then on the podium. Norris was unbothered, almost playful. “Sour? I like sour sweets,” he smirked. “I don’t know why I can’t stop laughing when I get booed. I think it makes it more entertaining for me. They can keep doing it if they want.”
He even invited the debate back to Monza. “Like Oscar deserved the win in Budapest, I deserved to be ahead at Monza. Simple as that.”
You can read that as bravado. You can also read it as a driver completely at ease with the noise. The title lead — by a single point, over the teammate parked on the opposite side of the garage — means the spotlight won’t dim any time soon.
This is a delicate balance for McLaren. Having already banked the Constructors’ Championship, there’s a temptation to intervene any time the two orange cars find each other, just to keep the calendar neat. But the team’s messaging has been relentlessly consistent: do it fair, fix errors you make, don’t blow up both championships to make the internet happy. What looked like leniency in Singapore also came with an internal sanction. What looked like a tilt in Monza was framed, credibly, as a correction to a decision they botched. These aren’t always popular moves. They are the moves a title-contending operation makes.
None of this lets the drivers off the hook. Piastri has been brilliant this year, and he’ll know momentum can turn on a dime across a flyaway. He’ll also know that if the next few Sundays deliver the kind of elastic, elbows-out duels we saw earlier in the season, the mood music around McLaren will change right along with them. That’s the thing about paddock storms — they blow over as fast as they blow up.
Norris, though, owns the moment. He’s racing with that unmistakable calm the very top guys get when the car does exactly what they ask and the team are humming along. Boo if you want. He hears you. He just can’t stop smiling.
And while the timeline floods with theories and slow-motion replays of Monza and Singapore, the only rule that’s mattered since summer came painted the same papaya shade: finish ahead of the other guy.
Because in late October, with the board reading Norris P1 in the championship and McLaren already untouchable in the teams’ race, the rest is commentary. The next few Sundays will write the only answer everyone will accept.
As Norris put it, “Think whatever you want.” Then he did what points leaders do. He won.
