Lando Norris was unimpressed with Simon Pagenaud after he took him out to stop him winning his second virtual IndyCar race.
The McLaren driver won the first IndyCar iRacing Challenge event that he entered at the Circuit of the Americas, and Norris returned for another piece of the action at the latest round at the Brickyard – he got a little more action than he bargained for though.
Norris was in the lead again, well on his way to a second win, but Reigning Indianapolis 500 winner Pagenaud said on his livestream “we take Lando out, let’s do it”, before Norris hit the slow-moving Pagenaud.
“Oh, I was pitting, I didn’t mean to…” Pagenaud added just before the crash.
While Norris confirmed that the French driver did apologise, he said his actions were due to the fact that he didn’t want a non-IndyCar driver to win, and called him “a bit salty”.
“He apologised,” Norris said, as quoted by Crash.net.
“He said he wanted to come into the pits and he wanted to slow me up, and he wanted Askew to win, he didn’t want me to win.
“So he tried slowing me up a little bit and was going to come into the pits. Had no intention of taking me out. Just wanted to slow me down…by letting off in the middle of the corner and braking right in front of me. So yeah.
“Do you know how many hours, how much time I put into the left [turn]? How many hours I’ve spent driving in a straight line and then just doing this.
“I must have spent a day in total, I reckon I’ve spent 24 hours flicking driving in a straight line and turning left, trying to perfect it. With the most delicate touch, I’ve tried doing it one-handed, with my knee. 24 Hours!
“And then because that guy gets a bit salty that a non-IndyCar driver is about to win an Indy race. It just ruins it. So, yeah, that’s that.”
On his Twitch stream Norris continued to vent and said that the “selfish” drivers didn’t think about all the effort that his team had put in to the race.
“I feel so bad for the guys as well,” said the Briton.
“Maybe some people aren’t taking it as seriously and they just think it’s a game and it doesn’t matter.
“But there’s still a lot of other drivers, I had Jarv, the engineers and the guys doing strategy. We still put time into it, whether or not we’re at home doing nothing, they’re still working on it and they could be doing other things with their families let’s say.
“They’re still wanting to take part and win a race still. Then some guys just get all selfish, don’t care about any of it.”
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