Racing
© Jonathan Borba
Juan Pablo Montoya has sided firmly with Lando Norris and his management after The Guardian detailed a tense interview with the McLaren driver, calling the reporter’s conduct “very poor” and saying he would not speak to that journalist again if agreed limits had been ignored.
Speaking on his MontoyAS podcast, the former Formula 1 driver argued the central issue was simple: if an exclusive interview comes with clear off-limits subjects, a reporter should respect them. “If they tell you: we have an exclusive interview with Lando, but you can't ask this, and you do it anyway... I would never speak to him again,” Montoya said.
The dispute followed The Guardian’s account of an interview in which Norris’ management had barred questions about Max Verstappen, George Russell, Norris’ relationships with those rivals and the current F1 regulations. According to the report, the journalist still pushed into those areas until a management representative cut in during a question about the regulations and indicated the interview was over, despite the reporter saying there were still “ten minutes” left. Norris was described as looking uncomfortable and replied: “I’m not the boss.”
Montoya said Norris and his team were right to step in. He argued that Norris handled the moment by appearing willing to answer while knowing the intervention would come because the question should not have been asked in the first place.
He also said the restricted topics were the kind of deliberately provocative questions designed to draw a damaging line about Verstappen. Montoya offered his own example of the kind of answer a reporter might have been seeking: “To be honest, I'm not such a fan of Max, his character doesn't suit me, I don't like the way he races.” In his view, “80 per cent of the article is based on that.”
Montoya widened that criticism into a broader attack on parts of the media. “Journalists never ask those kinds of questions with good intentions,” he said. “There's never good intention behind those questions.” He said the aim is often to make a driver “stumble, say something wrong,” then turn it into “a headline” and “finish” someone.
He framed that mistrust as something learned through experience in Formula 1. Montoya said “very few journalists are people you can really trust to say things openly without it being used against you,” adding that early in a career it is easy to assume people are trustworthy before learning who can and cannot be relied on.
That, he said, is also why drivers and their teams guard interviews so tightly. Montoya warned that even off-the-record remarks can be used anyway, saying some reporters can be trusted but “many others, purely for a scoop, will stab you in the back without hesitation,” a view that underpins his defense of Norris’ management and the controls it imposed.