Former President Donald Trump made an appearance at Sunday’s Miami Grand Prix as a guest of McLaren. Trump walked out into the paddock with a frenzy of attention following him before he made his way into the McLaren garage.
After waving to the crowd from McLaren’s pit box, Trump had some words with McLaren’s American CEO Zak Brown. He also met with F1 boss Stefano Domenicali and FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem. Of course, McLaren would go on to win the race, which was an unexpected result considering Max Verstappen’s dominance this season and in qualifying and the Sprint race earlier in the weekend – catch the race recap here.
After the race, Trump found Lando Norris to speak to. Norris later told media that he was “honored” Trump came to speak to him. He also said that Trump told him he was his good luck charm.
The TV announcers took the opportunity to call Norris’ win by saying “Norris trumps Lando” in Miami as he crossed the finish line.
Trump’s Formula 1 appearance comes at a highly contentious time for him as he faces a criminal trial over hush money payments. His being there stirred up emotions on both sides of the aisle as people both cheered and booed as he walked out of the garage into pit lane. When queried about his visit, McLaren put together a statement explaining how Trump came to be in the team’s garage. It follows below.
“McLaren is a non-political organization however we recognize and respect the office of President of the United States so when the request was made to visit our garage on race day we accepted alongside the president of the FIA and the CEO’s of Liberty Media and Formula 1.
“We were honored that McLaren Racing was chosen as the representative of F1 which gave us the opportunity to showcase the world class engineering that we bring to motorsport.”
Norris described his interaction with Trump in greater detail at the post-race driver’s press conference when asked what he thought of the former president being there, too.
“He saw me after and he came up to me and congratulated me, so I guess an honor because whenever you have someone like this, it has to be an honor for you for them to come up to you, for them to take time out of their life to pay their respect for what you’ve done. He said he was my lucky charm because of my win,” Norris laughed. “I don’t know if he’s going to come to more races now, but yeah, there’s a lot of special people, cool people that have been here this weekend. Donald is someone that you gotta have a lot of respect for anyways and for anyone like that who acknowledges what you can go out and do and acknowledges the work ethic to things, you’ve gotta be thankful for that. And I was, so yeah, a cool moment.”