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I feel sorry for Lando Norris. He’s in a horrible position. He has an outside shot at winning the Formula 1 world championship for the first time. But to do so he has to consistently outscore Max Verstappen at an unreasonable rate of points.
At the same time, Verstappen is almost outright bullying Norris whenever they come wheel to wheel on the circuit. It happened repeatedly in Austria, to the point they made contact and both their races were ruined - Lando’s more ruined than Max’s.
But there Norris got a taste of how far Verstappen is prepared to go to defend a crucial position at a crucial moment. At the Red Bull Ring, it was for the lead of the race - proper high stakes. At Austin we saw round two, this time for a podium behind the dominant Ferraris. Verstappen was again at his uncompromising best and Norris unable to find a clean way past.
Regardless of F1’s stupid rules and inconsistent stewarding ‘inappropriately interfering’ in this fight, to borrow Andrea Stella’s phrasing, this is surely what he meant when he called their battle a “beautiful piece of motorsport” - F1’s two main protagonists going at it, lap after lap, wheel to wheel, for position.
And it really was beautiful in its own ugly way. There is something endlessly fascinating about the sports psychology of these moments, because you really see the true nature of each driver laid bare.
Verstappen approaches these moments with the uncompromising ruthlessness of a Michael Schumacher or an Ayrton Senna. ‘I will do absolutely whatever it takes to win, no matter the cost, and I will push the envelope of the rules absolutely as far as I can possibly get away with’.
A TRAIT THAT'S ALWAYS BEEN THERE
It sets Verstappen up as the presumed ‘Alpha’ on the F1 grid. He’s been racing this way since he started. If you’re competing in the same team as him, you either have to get the hell out of there - as Carlos Sainz and Daniel Ricciardo did in their own ways - or you have to become utterly subservient to him, as Eddie Irvine was to Schumacher and Sergio Perez is to Verstappen now.
If you are an external rival, you need to work out how to deal with him when you meet him on track. If you don’t really care too much about beating him, or how it looks on you if he duffs you up - what I would call the ‘Kimi Raikkonen attitude’ - then it rolls off you like water off a duck.
But that’s much easier if your 2016 Ferrari is a shed and you’re just stretching out the final big-money earning years of your career without trying to cause problems. Raikkonen’s slightly outraged but generally baffled view of Verstappen’s defensive driving was absolutely fine in that scenario. Kimi just wrote Max off as a bit of a lunatic.
Nobody really knew how to deal with Max when he first arrived on the scene. Those double-jink moves in the braking zones that sent Ferraris careering into run-off areas in avoidance were basically unheard of in F1 at the time, and the FIA - and the late Charlie Whiting in particular - had to get quite forceful with their words and deeds to get Verstappen to modify his behaviour.
And younger drivers coming through take their cues from what they see in F1 and try to employ similar tactics. Now we’re used to hearing endless complaints if someone makes too late a move to block an overtaking car in the braking zone. It’s why Fernando Alonso was so furious with Liam Lawson in the Austin sprint race.
Max still makes moves to block as late as he possibly dares, but he’s subtly modified his technique to almost blend this into the one defensive change of direction that is permitted by the rules.
THE ADRIAN NEWEY OF RACECRAFT
It’s one example of his absolute genius as a racing driver. Like all the very best drivers in history he has an incredible mastery of the brake pedal, and how and when to use exactly the right amount of pressure, at the right moment, to position his car exactly where he wants it.
This makes him incredibly difficult to overtake when the delta between your car and his is marginal. The slam dunks, like Norris had over him at Zandvoort, he doesn’t bother fighting. But a situation like Austin, or Austria - marginal tyre delta and a car good enough to fight with - well, then it’s time to roll up the sleeves and see what you’re made of.
He’s also incredibly good at fine judgement when the margins for error are incredibly small. How many times do you see him snatch a brake, or bounce into someone when defending? It’s very rare.
He hasn't got any of the clumsiness Nico Rosberg had when racing Lewis Hamilton for the championship in 2014-16, and that really helps Verstappen dance on the limit of what is acceptable and what is not under the rules as they are written.
He’s nearly always in complete control of his car, which is a major factor when stewards determine predominant fault in a racing incident.
There’s perhaps no better driver on the grid right now at operating in the grey areas of what the rules allow. He’s like the Adrian Newey of racecraft in this regard.
RACING IN THE GREY AREAS
All drivers have an ingrained sense of etiquette and what constitutes proper racing, which you learn almost by osmosis as you experiment, make mistakes and race against different people with their own styles.
But it’s by its nature an ambiguous art, and it also relates somehow to very personal questions of ethics and fairness - which are also by their nature grey rather than black and white.
And F1's attempts to eliminate the grey, by codifying racing into black-and-white guidelines that dictate exactly where a car should be and when as it’s trying to overtake or being overtaken, and at what specific point in a given corner that judgement should be made, only play further to Verstappen’s capacity to exploit the loopholes.
Austin Turn 12 with Norris was a classic example. The current guidelines are so focused on what the attacking car should do - in this case Norris - that almost no consideration is given to how the defending car should behave through the totality of the corner.
Verstappen knows, to the letter of the guidelines, that he just needs to have his own car level or ahead at the apex, and whatever happens after that the corner is his.
This particular form of Verstappen defending goes at least as far back as Brazil 2021, when at Turn 4 he suddenly reappeared on Lewis Hamilton’s inside while the Mercedes driver was trying to come past around the Red Bull’s outside.
They both went off the track, the stewards took no action, the race continued, and Hamilton eventually got past anyway.
There was argument at the time that Verstappen should have been penalised - because it somehow at the very least looked wrong. Mercedes even requested a right of review. But nothing came of it, and that type of defence is still quite obviously permitted. Verstappen has become the master of using it to make life difficult for his rivals.
It's always been true that the onus is greater on the attacking driver to leave space and avoid collisions - Verstappen too has fallen foul of this (see Abu Dhabi 2021, lap one, or Las Vegas 2023, lap one) - and this was where Norris needed to be much smarter in Austin.
PSYCHOLOGICAL ADVANTAGE
Norris looks really like he’s learning on the job right now, like he’s not yet battle-hardened running at the front with the absolute top dog and so is still prone to errors of judgment in peak moments of stress.
Up until the moment they both went off the track at Turn 12, Verstappen was defending position masterfully, and you wondered if Norris would simply run out of tyre advantage before he could make a move stick.
When Norris briefly hesitated between Turn 19 and the last corner, feigning to give up the place he'd taken illegally by going off at Turn 12, before darting to the inside at Turn 1 and retaining track position to the flag, it felt as though McLaren was less convinced about Verstappen copping a penalty for forcing Norris off (as the team claimed) and was maybe more concerned that Norris simply wouldn’t be able to overtake cleanly if he gave the place back.
He was certainly fast enough to get past again. But there’s a big difference between being fast enough to do something and actually doing it…
Perhaps McLaren calculated in this instance that it was better to hand matters over to the stewards and hope for the best.
And this is where the real genius of Verstappen’s approach comes in. Yes, it creates controversy, and sometimes he falls the wrong side of the line and gets punished, but to him it all seems worth it to try to get inside a rival's head.
I would argue he’s very much in Lando’s and McLaren’s heads right now. He has been since Austria, where Norris sounded defeated on the radio as his repeated attempts to pass were forcefully rebuffed and he became increasingly exasperated by Verstappen’s tactics.
Again, it’s one thing to know Verstappen will race this way, it’s quite another to experience it for yourself with a potentially vital race result on the line.
Norris challenged the Alpha, even risked that contact under braking for Turn 3, but still came off second best.
Austin was round two, and again Norris lost. He was basically mugged at Turn 1, where he needed to be more aggressive in closing the door after making a fast-enough start. In his own words that was “muppet” driving.
It’s true the stewards could very well have taken a dimmer view of the fact Verstappen ran Norris wide on the exit while also going off-track himself. As the overtaking car on the inside in that scenario, Verstappen definitely contravened two of F1’s current racing guidelines.
It was similar to Las Vegas 2023 against Charles Leclerc. But, this was a different day, a different circuit, a different set of stewards, a different corner profile entirely. Much less obvious, more ambiguous. And it’s lap one - it’s basically a crapshoot. Verstappen got away with one this time.
But again, he climbed inside Norris’s head. You could tell from all the subsequent radio chatter aimed at getting the stewards to review an incident they didn’t even feel was noteworthy at the time it occurred.
At Turn 12 later on, Norris needed to be much smarter. The odds are stacked against you going around the outside of anyone, let alone a driver of Verstappen’s quality and ruthlessness. It was never going to come off. Max would never allow it.
At some point, Norris is probably going to have to find a way to stand up to a driver who he’s friends with outside of the car. I don’t believe Max believes in friendships when he's inside the car - inside the car it’s basically all-out war and every driver for his or herself.
HOW OTHERS HAVE COPED
Others before Norris have faced this test. Hamilton probably waited at least two races too long to make his point in 2021, having been run out of room at Imola and Barcelona. It felt like the sense of inherent fairness in Hamilton’s racing style just couldn’t compute with Verstappen’s ‘risk it all’, ‘win or bust’ approach - and responding to this also brought out the worst in Hamilton. Rarely have they raced each other cleanly since.
Leclerc got bullied by Max in Austria in 2019, when that seminal first Red Bull-Honda victory was at stake. Back then, Verstappen wasn’t punished for running Leclerc’s Ferrari out of road on the exit of Turn 3 while overtaking it on the inside for the lead. At Austin last weekend, he would have definitely been penalised for that same move.
But anyway, Leclerc quickly set matters right by adjusting his own slightly more passive style and going full elbows out against Verstappen at Silverstone - the very next race.
That was smart from Leclerc. The whole episode revealed he wasn’t as naturally aggressive as Verstappen (who is?), but it also showed Leclerc was prepared and able to quickly adapt to the new circumstances he faced.
What we’ve seen this season could be telling us something about Norris’s inherent psychology - is he simply a fundamentally more passive racer than, say, his McLaren team-mate Oscar Piastri, who has completed two daring and crucial passes for the lead in 2024 - only not yet on Verstappen?
If roles at McLaren were reversed and Piastri was the one in a marginal title fight with Verstappen, would he be getting bullied off the track or would he be standing his ground regardless - or even finding opportunistic ways to pass Max (like with Norris at Monza and Leclerc in Baku) that Norris hasn’t yet discovered for himself?
THE EXTRA COMPLICATION FOR NORRIS
The problem Norris has is the stakes are far higher for him. He’s the one actually in with a title shot, one that’s already so remote that he simply can’t afford to risk a race-ending collision with Verstappen.
Equally, he can’t just cast that title shot completely aside to make an important psychological point in battle - for fear of costing McLaren vital constructors’ championship points against a suddenly resurgent Ferrari, which in Austin had two drivers operating at a very high level in a car that suddenly looks like it might be making a late case to be the best on the grid since that Monza floor upgrade.
Verstappen knows all this of course, and has the luxury of a massive individual points lead that means any race-ending collision for him and Norris benefits only him.
And he also doesn’t really need to worry about the constructors’ championship because defeat there rests mainly on the shoulders of Perez, for performing too consistently below the level of the car, and also Red Bull, for turning the RB20 into the wrong kind of monster and taking a long time to correct those mistakes.
So Verstappen has the advantage of circumstance, as well as the ingrained psychological advantage he’s already established over his buddy.
Breaking out of that stranglehold is not the work of a moment for Norris, but it remains a reckoning he will likely need to have at some point and cannot put off forever - lest he cast himself as the perennial Beta to Verstappen’s Alpha.
The good news for Norris is that he isn’t the first driver who went on to achieve great things who first needed to learn some hard lessons from running at the front consistently. Already we can see from Austin that his starts have markedly improved compared to earlier in the season.
If the remaining weaknesses we’re seeing right now aren’t somehow fundamental and can be eliminated, then there’s every chance a future, battle-hardened version of Norris can come out swinging at Verstappen when the prevailing circumstances are more in his favour.
But even then, against a driver with racecraft as uncompromising and creatively brilliant as Verstappen, there’s still every chance Norris will, more often than not, come off second-best.
