At Formula 1’s Abu Dhabi season finale 12 months Lando Norris, firmly corrected a journalist from another publication who made the mistake of describing Max Verstappen as his ‘BFF’ – i.e. ‘best friend forever’.
“Don’t ever say that again,” Norris snapped. “We respect each other and we get along. Kind of friends away, but that’s it. We just have a lot of respect for one another. That’s it.”
At the time, no one knew this year’s championship fight would principally involve those two drivers. But by the time Verstappen clinched the crown two rounds ago, had Norris diminished the view he’s a bit too cosy with his supposed rival?
Whenever the pair met on the track this year, Verstappen usually got the upper hand. Granted, he always had the benefit of being the hunted rather than the hunter, which brought with it the knowledge any mutually destructive collision would be to his advantage.
Even so, Norris never succeeded in making life uncomfortable for Verstappen. They collided at the Red Bull Ring, for which Verstappen was penalised, yet the defending champion still out-scored his challenger. Verstappen deployed his ‘divebomb defence’ to useful effect in Austin. Even in Mexico, where Norris out-scored Verstappen, the Red Bull driver’s cynical lunge at turn seven successfully prevented the McLaren driver from winning the race and maximise his points scored.
Other drivers have pushed Verstappen far enough to provoke a reaction. This was clearest during his bitter 2021 world championship fight with Lewis Hamilton.
But another driver has demonstrated an ability to get under his skin: Hamilton’s soon-to-be-ex-team mate George Russell. Even before he joined Mercedes (though while he was one of their junior talents) Russell needled his future rival.
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Late in 2020 he spoke up for Verstappen’s struggling team mate Alexander Albon, saying he was “being made to look like an idiot” by Red Bull. Verstappen was not impressed by the slight on his team, responding: “George doesn’t know anything about the team so I think it’s better he just focuses on his car and his performance instead of speaking for someone else.”
Last weekend, Verstappen was left fuming when the stewards penalised him for getting in Russell’s way during qualifying. He accused the Mercedes driver of trying to get him a penalty, which resulted in Russell being promoted to pole position.
In the immediate aftermath Verstappen said he’d “lost all respect” for his rival. Was there any there to begin with? He called Russell a “dickhead” to his face after the pair tangled at Baku last year.
But whatever mutual respect there might have been before has now been incinerated. Verstappen accused Russell of “lying” in the stewards’ meeting at Losail, adding he had “no regrets at all” about his subsequent remarks “because I meant everything I said.”
“If I had to do it again, maybe I would have said even more, knowing the outcome of the race result,” Verstappen continued. “I still can’t believe that someone can be like that in a stewards’ room. For me, that was so unacceptable.
“We’re all racing drivers. We all have a lot of respect for each other. We even play sports together. You travel together. And of course, you have moments where you get together, you crash or whatever. You’re not happy. In my whole career, I’ve never experienced what I have experienced in the stewards’ room in Qatar. And for me, that was really unacceptable.”
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Russell said he had done no more than argued his case and accused Verstappen of taking a professional dispute personally.
“It’s pretty clear,” he explained. “On your lap you all have to follow a certain lap time because the stewards don’t want you trundling around too slow, when you’ve got [another] car driving at 200 miles an hour. He was in breach of that, I was following to the letter of the law.
“I wasn’t trying to get him the penalty. That’s just how things transpired. At the end of the day, I was on pole position at that time in the session, he went on to pole position.
“But it’s racing. All of this is racing. But he’s felt the need to take it personal. I have no idea why he has done that.”
The Mercedes driver tried to put the focus squarely on his rival’s temperament. “He cannot deal with adversity. Whenever anything is not going his way, he lashes out with unnecessary anger and borderline violence.”
It won’t have escaped Verstappen’s notice that Russell, who is a director of the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association, took Norris’s side over the incident between the championship contenders in Austin, and has pressed for the rules to be changed to prevent Verstappen and others performing similar moves again.
“There wasn’t necessarily anything in the guidelines about Max’s manoeuvre,” he said ahead of last week’s race. “If you divebomb and go off the track, that is effectively out of control. So everybody’s in agreement with [changing] these things.”
Is there a reason why Russell is picking this fight now? He may already be considering the possibility of a championship fight next year, when he becomes Mercedes’ most experienced driver alongside newcomer Andrea Kimi Antonelli.
Russell has enjoyed a strong run in recent races: He could have won in Brazil, did win in Las Vegas and took his second consecutive pole position – Verstappen’s fury notwithstanding – in Qatar. Verstappen easily passed him off the line when the latter race began, but what might have transpired had Russell’s start been fractionally better?
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After Norris and Verstappen tangled in Austria, the Red Bull driver said he told his rival: “I’m not there to try to crash you out of the way.” But Russell made the startling claim Verstappen told him the exact opposite in Qatar, saying: “I’m going to put you on your fucking head in the wall.” Verstappen has reportedly already denied this claim.
When the season began, Russell was being asked about the possibility Verstappen might be his next team mate. He welcomed the prospect, describing him as “the best driver on the grid.”
Now Russell is calling Verstappen a “bully” who has been allowed to “get away with murder.” The prospect of the two sharing a team any time soon is surely over, and Russell has let Verstappen know he should expect a tougher fight from him than Norris offered.
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