The 2024 F1 season has been a battle between Red Bull and McLaren for the most part, but there is one factor that remains very important. Max Verstappen and Lando Norris have had two very different careers in F1.
Verstappen has three world championships and 61 race wins, while Norris has just one win, two pole positions and 19 podiums.
But believe it or not, they’re both at the same point in their careers: the pinnacle.
Verstappen and Norris are currently two of the best drivers on the grid and driving the two fastest cars in F1.
In the last seven races, the Dutchman and Briton have won one and lost two together five times. Of those five races, Verstappen took decisive victories in four, and he might have won all five if not for an ill-timed safety car stint at the Miami Grand Prix.
Of course, one of the two times during this streak they didn’t finish 1-2 was last weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix, when the pair fought tooth and nail for the victory in the final stages of the race before making contact.
, punctured the tires of both cars. Norris was excluded from the race, but FERSSTAPN had to accept fifth place.
However, this battle actually displays areas where Bertepen always has Norris, and in this regard, it was this battle against Red Bulling. Verstappen’s driving style was in Norris’ head and the pressure was mounting on him.
When Verstappen first burst onto the F1 scene in 2015, it wasn’t his speed that caught people’s attention, but rather the aggressiveness and extraordinary courage of the then-17-year-old.
His collision-heavy “push now, worry later” approach has faded a bit since then, but his aggressive wheel-to-wheel style has not. During his time at the front, many, if not all, drivers were left with Verstappen’s brutal style stuck in their minds and were almost forced to change their approach in some way.
In 2021, Lewis Hamilton realized that hanging around the Dutchman wasn’t going to work, because if he crashed and got penalized, he would just push Hamilton off the track. This is one of the main reasons why Verstappen won the 2021 World Championship. Three years later, Norris feels the same pressure.
Perhaps the best example of this was in Austria last weekend. There, the above -mentioned contact in the third round brought two pilots. Verstappen was found to be at fault for the incident, which saw Norris brake and close on Verstappen, causing his car to drift slightly to the left, and was given a 10-second penalty.
However, the fact that Norris was not at fault does not mean that he was not involved in the incident or that he could not have taken action to avoid it.
It is understood that while Verstappen’s car was leaning to the left, the McLaren’s left tyre was just above the white line, meaning it could push across the entire painted section of tarmac if necessary, which in this case he needed to do. The incident occurred after three separate (unsuccessful) dive attempts by Norris, two of which involved Verstappen also making a braking move, forcing Norris to avoid contact.
After these attempts, it became clear that Norris had lost confidence in how his opponent was riding him, which ultimately led to the contact at corner three. The incident caused huge drama between the two friends, which quickly spread throughout the F1 paddock and the fan community. Verstappen’s relentlessness not only got to Norris’ head, but apparently to the heads of members of his own team as well. All of this is a direct result of what Verstappen does best: be unpredictable, and almost scary, in virtually any form of combat, and subsequently getting into his opponents\’ minds.
Some say it\’s dirty, and some say it\’s clean and just plain tactics. Either way, he is the only one who can do it, and it is a masterful way of operating that has brought unprecedented success.
This season, Verstappen is singlehandedly carrying the Red Bull racing ship.
When the season started, Red Bull looked dominant again with Max Verstappen and Sergio Pérez going 1-2 in three of the first four races, but after the Miami Grand Prix the talk shifted to whether they had the fastest car. However, even when McLaren, and sometimes even Mercedes and Ferrari, were objectively faster than Red Bull, Verstappen, one way or another, still clawed his way to victory.
In several races this season, Verstappen has been able to take advantage of Norris and several other frontrunners for that matter in a variety of ways. Verstappen is almost always a battle with the driver, regardless of whether it will affect the end of the IMOL, almost everyone will play in a Canadian Unning situation, or to start a good start in Spain. 。
On the other hand, Perez’s teammates who drive the same car scored only 15 points on the last five races, but Verstappen won three in the race highway and this segment won the sprint. I got it. This not only shows how out of shape Perez is, but also how dominant Verstappen still is in a race car that’s far from dominant.
His speed in this Red Bull was sensational at various times, but it wasn’t the deciding factor. At the end of the day, they are F1 drivers and all of them have the ability to move quickly around the circuit and put in great qualifying laps, even if some are more rare than others.
When you hear the words “race car,” many people mistakenly think of wheel-to-wheel combat, but in reality it’s all about that, along with tire management, the ability to handle pressure situations, the ability to make smart decisions, and so on.
Many drivers in the history of the sport have shown how good they are in these disciplines, but few, if any, have managed to dominate each of these categories, and even fewer have managed to achieve them all every single race weekend. Like it or not, Verstappen is one of those drivers, a special talent with an extraordinary mentality that puts an exclamation point on the phrase “I refuse to lose.
” Until Norris or McLaren or anyone else can adapt the speed, aggression and mental toughness to their form, or simply build a car so fast that the Flying Dutchman can’t win, no one is going to be able to beat Verstappen for an entire race season.
