BAKU, Azerbaijan - Lando Norris said McLaren will not budge on the commitment to a fair title fight despite the fallout to the controversial Italian Grand Prix, insisting he and teammate Oscar Piastri are still free to race in "99%" of situations.
Championship leader Piastri was asked to move over to let Norris through at the end of the Monza race after a dramatic sequence of events saw the McLaren drivers change positions on track.
Piastri had been given the favourable undercut -- the F1 phrase for an earlier pit stop -- in a bid to defend from the charging Ferrari of Charles Leclerc and that, coupled with a slow stop for Norris a lap later, meant the Australian took second position.
Despite a brief protest, Piastri then agreed a McLaren request to give second position back to Norris, meaning he left Monza 31 points ahead in the title fight instead of 37.
The controversy has been the main talking point since Monza. Asked if he was surprised by the negativity, Norris replied: "Not in the world that we live in nowadays, because that's all people want to do, you know, is be negative and talk badly about others. So, honestly, not a surprise.
"You know, you also need headlines, you also need people to read things, so not a surprise at all from my side. But it also doesn't affect us as a team. It's what you expect nowadays, and I think in the world that we live in, is more negativity than ever positivity.
"So, yeah, we continue to do things our way. Whether people agree with it or not, it's not our problem and we don't really care about that. So, we're happy, we focus on ourselves.
"Of course, you always want good things to come out of it. The team are trying to do a good thing. Whether people agree in the end of the day is not our problem. We want it to be fair, we want it to be equal for both of us. And then people can comment whatever they like after that."
McLaren has been determined this year to let its drivers race as fairly as possible. Parallels were drawn between Monza and last year's Hungarian Grand Prix, when Norris -- after a lot of back and forth with the pit wall -- moved over to let Piastri claim his maiden race victory after the Australian had been shuffled out of the lead due to McLaren's pit sequencing.
Norris said Monza has given a false perception that McLaren does not let its drivers race.
"I mean, for 99% of things, of course [we can race]," he said. "How things then look because of something that happened last weekend gives everyone a very different opinion or oversight on things.
"But if you make it as simple as, and kind of this is how we've done it, as simple as what happened in Hungary last year was a very similar thing, that the driver and the lead has priority in a pit-stop sequence. That's exactly what we were entering last weekend. That things don't change.
"But the fact is, as soon as we just re-established the position, Oscar could race me freely, still had the advantage of starting basically on my gearbox and trying to race me, so he still gained overall. But otherwise, we've been free every time to race. It's just in one lap of a pit sequence is when the lead driver always has priority and that's how it's always been and that's how it continues to be.
"But otherwise, like we said, we're free to race."
On the subject of McLaren interfering in the fight, Norris pointed out that the team has for the most part kept themselves out of the battle.
"I think there's a lot less than you think. This was one of the first things in quite a long time. And it wasn't the fact I had a slow pit stop which was the reasoning, it was more the fact of the changing of positions, the sequencing of things, which was the same as, I know a very different time, but the same as Hungary last year."
Norris and Piastri can help secure McLaren a second successive constructors' championship at this weekend's Baku race. The team will win the title if it outscores Ferrari by nine points or more, isn't outscored by Mercedes by 12 points or more and isn't outscored by Red Bull by 33 points or more.
It would be the earliest a team has ever secured the constructors' championship.