Norris: Verstappen’s claim he would already have won title in a McLaren is “nonsense”

Lando Norris dismissed Max Verstappen’s claim the championship would have been “over a long time ago” if he drove a McLaren.

The McLaren driver said Verstappen’s comments were an example of Red Bull’s “aggressive nature” and claimed his rival doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Norris, who can clinch the championship in tomorrow’s grand prix, said: “Max is very welcome to say everything he wants, to be honest. He kind of earned the right, he’s won four world championships.

“I have a lot of respect and I think that gives anyone a lot of credit in general. He’s achieved an incredible amount, more than anyone generally dreams of achieving.

“So Max generally has a good clue about a lot of things, but there’s also a lot of things he doesn’t have much of a clue about.”

“But this is also Red Bull’s way of going about things,” Norris told media in the press conference after the sprint race. “It’s this kind of aggressive nature and just talking nonsense a lot of the time.

“So it depends if you want to listen to it and talk about it – like you love to – or you do what we do as a team, which is just kind of keep our heads down, keep focused. Maybe he would have done but he hasn’t so far and he keeps trying.”

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Verstappen made the comments in an interview for the official F1 channel earlier this week. He said “it’s not going to change my life” if he fails to win a fifth consecutive world championship title this year.

“We are in this fight still because of other people’s failures, not because of if you look at the whole of a season, what we did,” he said. “Yes, we did really well. We have really maximised all – pretty much all – races before the ones that I mentioned.

“But if we would have been in the position of how dominant of a car they had, the championship would have been over a long time ago.”

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